"But what kind of signs are they tracking?" I asked.
"Little things, mostly." He smiled. "Tiny things-some things you or I wouldn't be able to see if they were pointed out to us. Sometimes there's nothing and they have to go on guess - that's where the coordinator helps." He sobered. "Looks like black magic, doesn't it? It does, even to me, sometimes, and I've been a Dorsai for fourteen years."
I stared at the moving figures.
"You said - three," I said.
"That's right," answered the Groupman. "There were three snipers. We've tracked them from the office in the building they fired from, to here. This was their headquarters - the place they moved from, to the office, just before the killing. There's sign they were here a couple of days, at least, waiting."
"Waiting?" I asked. "How do you know there were three and they were waiting?"
"Lots of repetitive sign. Habitual actions. Signs of camping beds set up. Food signs for a number of meals. Metal lubricant signs showing weapons had been disassembled and worked over here. Signs of a portable, private phone - they must have waited for a phone call from someone telling them the Commander was on his way in from the encampment."
"But how do you know there were only three?"
"There's sign for only three," he said. "Three - all big for your world, all under thirty. The biggest man had black hair and a full beard. He was the one who hadn't changed clothes for a week - " The Groupman sniffed the air. "Smell him?"
I sniffed hard and long.
"I don't smell a thing," I said.
"Hmm," the Groupman looked grimly pleased. "Maybe those fourteen years have done me some good, after all. The stink of him's in the air, all right. It's one of the things our Hunter Teams followed to this place."
I looked aside at Lee Hall, then back at the soldier.
"You don't need my detectives at all, do you?" I said.
"No sir," he looked me in the face. "But we assume you'd want them to stay with us. That's all right."
"Yes." I said. And I left there. If my men were not needed, neither was I; and I had no time to stand around being useless. There was still Padma to talk to.
But it was not easy to locate the Outbond. The Exotic Embassy either could not or would not tell me where he was; and the Expedition Headquarters in Blauvain also claimed not to know. As a matter of ordinary police work, my own department kept track of important outworlders like the Graeme brothers and the Outbond, as they moved around our city. But in this case, there was no record of Padma ever leaving the room in which I had last seen him with Ian Graeme, early in the day. I finally took my determination in both hands and called Ian himself to ask if Padma was with him.
The answer was a blunt 'no'. That settled it. If Padma was with him, A Dorsai like Ian would have refused to answer rather than lied outright. I gave up. I was lightheaded with fatigue and I told myself I would go home, get at least a few hours sleep, and then try again.
So, with one of the professional soldiers in my police car to vouch for me at roadblocks, I returned to my own dark apartment; and when, alone at last, I came into the living room and turned on the light, there was Padma waiting for me in one of my own chair-floats.
The jar of finding him there was solid - more like an emotional explosion than I would have thought. It was like seeing a ghost in reality, the ghost of someone from whose funeral you have just returned. I stood staring at him.
"Sorry to startle you, Tom," he said. "I know, you were going to have a drink and forget about everything for a few hours. Why don't you have the drink, anyway?"
He nodded toward the bar built into a corner of the apartment living room. I never used the thing unless there were guests on hand; but it was always stocked - that was part of the maintenance agreement in the lease. I went over and punched the buttons for a single brandy and water. I knew there was no use offering Padma alcohol.
"How did you get in here?" I said, with back to him.
"I told your supervisor you were looking for me," Padma said. "He let me in. We Exotics aren't so common on your world here that he didn't recognize me."
I swallowed half the glass at a gulp, carried the drink back, and sat down in a chair opposite him. The background lighting in the apartment had gone on automatically when night darkened the windows. It was a soft light, pouring from the corners of the ceiling and from little random apertures and niches in the walls. Under it, in his blue robe, with this ageless face, Padma looked like the image of a buddah, beyond all the human and ordinary storms of life.
"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I've been looking all over for you."
"That's why I'm here," Padma said. "The situation being what it is, you would want to appeal to me to help you with it. So I wanted to see you away from any place where you might blame my refusal to help on outside pressures."
"Refusal?" I said. It was probably my imagination; but the brandy and water I had swallowed seemed to have gone to my head already. I felt light-minded and unreal. "You aren't even going to listen to me first before saying no?"
"My hope," said Padma, "is that you'll listen to me, first, Tom, before rejecting what I've got to tell you. You're thinking that I could bring pressure to bear on Ian Graeme to move his soldiers half a world away from Blauvain, or otherwise take the situation out of its critical present phase. But the truth is I could not; and even if I could, I would not."
"Would not," I echoed, muzzily.
"Yes. Would not. But not just because of personal choice. For four centuries now, Tom, we students of the Exotic Sciences have been telling other men and women that our human race was committed to a future, to the workings of history as it is. It's true we Exotics have a calculative technique now, called ontogenetics, that helps us to resolve any present or predicted moment into its larger historical factors. We've made no secret of having such techniques. But that doesn't mean we can control what will happen, particularly while other men still tend to reject the very thing we work with - the concept of a large, shifting pattern of events that involves all of us and our lives."
"I'm a Catholic," I said. "I don't believe in predestination."
"Neither do we on Mara and Kultis," said Pad-ma. "But we do believe in a physics of human action and interaction, which we believe works in a certain direction, toward a certain goal which we now think is less than a hundred years off - if, in fact, we haven't already reached it. Movement toward that goal has been building up for at least the last thousand years; and by now the momentum of its forces is massive. No single individual or group of individuals at the present time have the mass to oppose or turn that movement from its path. Only something greater than a human being as we know a human being might do that."
"Sure," I said. The glass in my hand was empty. I did not remember drinking the rest of its contents; but the alcohol was bringing me a certain easing of weariness and tension. I got up, went back to the bar, and came back with a full glass, while Padma waited silently. "Sure, I understand. You think you've spotted a historical trend here; and you don't want to interfere for fear of spoiling it A fancy excuse to do nothing."
"Not an excuse, Tom," Padma said; and there was something different, like a deep gong-note in his voice, that blew the fumes of the brandy clear from my wits for a second and made me look at him. "I'm not telling you I won't do anything about the situation. I'm telling you that I can't do anything about it. Even if I tried to do something, it would be no use. It's not for you alone that the situation is too massive; it's that way for everyone."
"How do you know if you don't try?" I said. "Let me see you try, and it not work Then maybe I'd believe you."
"Tom," he said, "can you lift me out of this chair?"
I blinked at him. I am no Dorsai, as I think I have said, but I am large for my world, which meant in this case that I was a head taller than Padma and perhaps a quarter again the weight. Also I was undoubtedly younger; and I had worked all my life to stay in good physical condition. I could have lifted someone my own weight out of that chair with no trouble, and Padma was less than that.