“That’s ridiculous,” Gretana snapped. “What are you going to do about that arm?”
“Could you fix up a splint?”
“If I do that will you promise to leave?”
“Leave?” Lorrest appeared to weigh up the idea. “For you, sweetheart, I’ll get off the planet altogether. All you have to do is tell me where…”
“Forget it!” Gretana’s former fears were displaced by anger. “Why is it that people like you can never listen to reason?”
To her surprise, Lorrest smiled in what could have been genuine pleasure. “I do believe you’re turning into a political animal,” he said mildly. “The first big hurdle is the realisation that nobody on the other side is capable of seeing the obvious. Once you’re over that, though, you come to the second and even bigger hurdle—what are you going to do about these people who can’t see the obvious? You can arrange to demonstrate to them that you’re right and they’re wrong, but that can take an awfully long time, and at the end of it…guess what?…they still can’t see what you’ve so carefully laid out in front of them. That brings you to the well-tried solution—stop them seeing anything at all.”
“You think you know everything,” Gretana said. Acutely aware that the retort had been both predictable and inadequate—exactly the sort of thing to trigger one of Lorrest’s painful laughs—she went to a drawer and took out a bamboo place mat. “Would this work?”
“Could do, if we bind it around my arm and fix up some kind of a sling. I knew you’d help.”
“I’m not helping with anything—all I want is for you to get the hell out of here.”
“Don’t pretend to be tough.”
“Do you know I’ve been to Station 23? That I went back to report on you?”
Lorrest glanced around the apartment with narrowed eyes. “What did they say?”
“Nothing. I didn’t get to make the report.”
“Oh? Why not?”
Gretana hesitated, wondering why she was further entangling herself. “I took a Terran back with me and it caused a bit of a furore.”
“You took a…” Lorrest’s shoulders gave a preliminary heave and he sat down on the nearest stool, his face already darkening. “That’s wonderful. I’ll bet Vekrynn wasn’t pleased.”
“He was furious.” Gretana smiled in spite of herself, comforted by Lorrest’s reaction. While padding the bamboo mat with cotton and binding it around his upper arm, she described how she had seen Denny Hargate at the nodal point and how on sheer impulse she had teleported him with her to Station 23. She noticed however that Lorrest’s expressions of amusement became muted as she outlined the subsequent events, and by the time she finished speaking his face had acquired a look of brooding solemnity.
“You sound as though you liked this man Hargate,” he said.
“He’s about the most sarcastic and short-tempered being I’ve ever met, but I suppose I did start to admire him in a way. You know, before I left Mollan that would have sounded grotesque.”
Lorrest gave her a wry smile. “Well, the thing you’ve got to keep uppermost in your mind is that when you first saw him he was obviously trying to end his life.”
“Yes, I could see he was…” She broke off, suddenly suspicious. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying you almost did Hargate a favour. He wanted to die anyway, so when Vekrynn…ah…disposed of him he was only doing what Hargate wanted.”
“Stop it!” Gretana threw her scissors on to the kitchen table and they slid along its surface with a metallic chittering. “I won’t listen to that kind of talk.”
“Sorry. I just don’t want you to feel guilty.”
“You’re still doing it. You…you are still calling Warden Vekrynn a criminal.” She tried to give a scornful laugh, but it emerged as something closer to a sob, further increasing her anger and frustration. “Why didn’t I tell the Bureau you were here?”
“There’s only one reason,” Lorrest said equably. “In your heart you didn’t really want to. If you’d been genuinely determined to turn me in nothing could have stopped you. Think about it.”
“I am thinking about it.” Gretana made the effort to clamp down on her emotions, realising that coldness and self-control were the best weapons against provocation. “I want you to go away from here and never come near me again.”
“So be it,” Lorrest said, apparently unruffled. He worked his splinted arm back into his shirt sleeve with some difficulty and began fumbling with the buttons. Gretana, disdaining to help, walked into the adjoining room and switched off the television set. Abruptly, and against her better judgement, she yielded to a desire to establish once and for all that the unwanted visitor was impervious to logic.
“Just tell me one thing,” she said, returning to the kitchen door. “Warden Vekrynn has everything that Mollanian society can offer—wealth, power, honour, privilege—so why should he descend to being the sort of person you think he is? What would he gain? Can you give me one shred of motive?”
“Not really,” Lorrest replied, picking up his jacket. “He’s a raving megalomaniac, of course—but merely saying that somebody is crazy isn’t analysing his motives.”
Gretana raised her eyebrows. “You are saying that he is insane?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Look at his big project, his famous Notebook. Do you know that he has taken imprints of the summarised depositions of every observer the Bureau has ever stationed on Earth?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It can’t be done, child—that’s what’s wrong with it.” Lorrest paused and softened the pedagogic manner with which he liked to impart information. “There’s an upper limit to the number of our imprints the brain can usefully accommodate. For most people it hovers around the thousand mark, and some highly gifted individuals can cope with three or four thousand—but Vekrynn has zapped himself with at least a hundred thousand. A tenth of a million, Gretana. I don’t think it does him any harm, any more than overfilling a bucket does it harm but it gives you a clue about how he regards his own intellect. A definite god complex, I’d say.”
Gretana struggled with unfamiliar concepts. “Even if what you say is true, it still doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“Doesn’t it? Perhaps what we would regard as culpable homicide he would see as justifiable insecticide. I’m telling you, Gretana, your friend Hargate was too much of an inconvenience to be let stay around.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Did you actually go with him to Cialth and see him installed in some kind of rest home for sick Terrans?”
“No. I told you Vekrynn was trying to protect me—we went to a disused Bureau station first of all, then we split up.”
Lorrest stopped in the act of donning his jacket. “A disused station? Was it bright and hot? All bright and hot, and yellow and orange, with a kind of forest made of barley sugar all around it?”
Gretana nodded. “That sounds right.”
“It must have been Branie IV. There was an observational headquarters there for one of the human civilisations we let go down the tubes about six centuries ago. If Vekrynn abandoned your friend there the heat will have killed him off within a day, but I don’t think he’d have done that. The skord connections are good from Branie IV, and quite a few travellers still go through there. It would be bloody awkward for Vekrynn if somebody found a dessicated Mr Hargate, spinster of this parish, sitting there in his pushchair. He’ll have dumped him somewhere else, but unfortunately—especially for Hargate—we’ve no way of knowing where.”
“Wrong!” Gretana was triumphant, eager to drive Lorrest into a trap of his own devising. “I went back to try to put things right with Vekrynn.”