He said uncertainly, "What is it, Captain?"
The captain said, "Excellency, the prisoner has escaped."
Aratap felt some of the weariness disappear. What was this? "The details, Captain!" he ordered, and straightened in his chair.
The captain gave them with a blunt economy of words.
He concluded, "I ask your permission, Excellency, to proclaim a general alarm. They are yet but minutes away."
"Yes, by all means," stuttered Hinrik, "by all means. A general alarm, indeed. Just the thing. Quickly! Quickly! Commissioner, I cannot understand how it could have happened. Captain, put every man to work. There will be an investigation, Commissioner. If necessary, every man on the guards will be broken. Broken! Broken!"
He repeated the word in near hysteria but the captain remained standing. It was obvious that he had more to say.
Aratap said, "Why do you wait?"
"May I speak to Your Excellency in private?" said the captain abruptly.
Hinrik cast a quick, frightened look at the bland, unperturbed Commissioner. He mustered a feeble indignation. "There are no secrets from the soldiers of the Khan, our friends, our-"
"Say your say, Captain," interposed Aratap gently.
The captain brought his heels together sharply and said, "Since I am ordered to speak, Your Excellency, I regret to inform you that my Lady Artemisia and my Lord Gillbret accompanied the prisoner in his escape."
"He dared to kidnap them?" Hinrik was on his feet. "And my guards allowed it?"
"They were not kidnapped, Excellency. They accompanied him voluntarily."
"How do you know?" Aratap was delighted, and thoroughly awake. It formed a pattern now, after all. A better pattern than he could have anticipated.
The captain said, "We have the testimony of the guard they overpowered, and the guards who, unwittingly, allowed them to leave the building." He hesitated, then added grimly, "When I interviewed my Lady Artemisia at the door of her private chambers, she told me she had been on the point of sleep. It was only later that I realized that when she told me that, her face was elaborately made-up. When I returned, it was too late. I accept the blame for the mismanagement of this affair. After tonight I will request Your Excellency to accept my resignation, but first have I still your permission to sound the general alarm? Without your authority I could not interfere with members of the royal family."
But Hinrik was swaying on his feet and could only stare at him vacantly.
Aratap said, "Captain, you would do better to look to the health of your Director. I would suggest you call his physician."
"The general alarm!" repeated the captain.
"There will be no general alarm," said Aratap. "Do you understand me? No general alarm! No recapture of the prisoner! The incident is closed! Return your men to their quarters and ordinary duties and look to your Director. Come, Major."
The Tyrannian major spoke tensely once they had left the mass of Palace Central behind them.
"Aratap," he said, "I presume you know what you're doing. I kept my mouth shut in there on the basis of that presumption."
"Thank you, Major." Aratap liked the night air of a planet full of green and growing things. Tyrann was more beautiful in its way, but it was a terrible beauty of rocks and mountains. It was dry, dry!
He went on: "You cannot handle Hinrik, Major Andros. In your hands he would wilt and break. He is useful, but requires gentle treatment if he is to remain so."
The major brushed that aside. "I'm not referring to that. Why not the general alarm? Don't you want them?"
"Do you?" Aratap stopped. "Let us sit here for a moment, Andros. A bench on a pathway along a lawn. What more beautiful, and what place is safer from spy beams? Why do you want the young man, Major?"
"Why do I want any traitor and conspirator?"
"Why do you, indeed, if you only catch a few tools while leaving the source of the poison untouched? Whom would you have? A cub, a silly girl, a senile idiot?"
There was a faint splashing of an artificial waterfall nearby. A small one, but decorative. Now that was a real wonder to Aratap. Imagine water, spilling out, running to waste, pouring 1ndefinitely down the rocks and along the ground. He had never educated himself out of a certain indignation over it.
"As it is," said the major, "we have nothing."
"We have a pattern. When the young man first arrived, we connected him with Hinrik, and that bothered us, because Hinrik is-what he is. But it was the best we could do. Now we see it was not Hinrik at all; that Hinrik was a misdirection. It was Hinrik's daughter and cousin he was after, and that makes more sense."
"Why didn't he call us sooner? He waited for the middle of the night."
"Because he is the tool of whoever is the first to reach him, and Gillbret, I am sure, suggested this night meeting as a sign of great zeal on his part."
"You mean we were called here on purpose? To witness their escape?".
"No, not for that reason. Ask yourself. Where do these people intend on going?"
The major shrugged.-"Rhodia is big."
"Yes, if it were the young Farrill alone who was concerned. But where on Rhodia would two members of the royal family go unrecognized? Particularly the girl."
"They would have to leave the planet, then? Yes, I agree."
"And from where? They can reach the Palace Field in a fifteen-minute walk. Now do you see the purpose of our being here?"
The major said, "Our ship?"
"Of course. A Tyrannian ship would seem ideal to them. Otherwise, they would have to choose among freighters. Farrill has been educated on Earth, and, I'm sure, can fly a cruiser."
"Now there's a point. Why do we allow the nobility to send out their sons in all directions? What business has a subject to know more about travel than will suffice him for local trade? We bring up soldiers against us."
"Nevertheless," said Aratap, with polite indifference, "at the moment Farrill has a foreign education, and let us take that into account objectively, without growing angry about it. The fact remains that I am certain they have taken our cruiser."
"I can't believe it."
"You have your wrist caller. Make contact with the ship, if you can."
The major tried, futilely.
Aratap said, "Try the Field Tower."
The major did so, and the small voice came out of the tiny receiver, in minute agitation: "But, Excellency, I don't understand-There is some mistake. Your pilot took off ten minutes ago."
Aratap was smiling. "You see? Work out the pattern and each little event becomes inevitable. And now do you see the consequences?"
The major did. He slapped his thigh, and laughed briefly. "Of course!" he said.
"Well," said Aratap, "they couldn't know, of course, but they have ruined themselves. Had they been satisfied with the clumsiest Rhodian freighter on the field, they would surely have escaped and-what's the expression?-I would have been caught with my trousers down this night. As it is, my trousers are firmly belted, and nothing can save them. And when I pluck them back, in my own good time"-he emphasized the words with satisfaction-"I will have the rest of the conspiracy in my hands as well."
He sighed and found himself beginning to feel sleepy once more. "Well, we have been lucky, and now there is no hurry. Call Central Base, and have them send another ship after us."
Ten: Maybe!
Biron Farrill's training in spationautics back on Earth had been largely academic. There had been the university courses in the various phases of spatial engineering, which, though half a semester was spent on the theory of the hyperatornic motor, offered little when it came to the actual manipulation of ships in space. The best and most skilled pilots learned their art in space and not in schoolrooms.
He had managed to take off without actual accident, though that was more luck than design. The Remorseless answered the controls far more quickly than Biron had anticipated. He had manipulated several ships on Earth out into space and back to the planet, but those had been aged and sedate models, maintained for the use of students. They had been gentle, and very, very tired, and had lifted with an effort and spiraled slowly upward through the atmosphere and into space.