“You say they put some sort of DNA invader into my body?” Bleys asked.
“Call it a fragment of DNA. But a living something that can attack a vulnerable area of your own natural system and convert it to something else, similar but inimical or destructive to you, personally.”
Bleys was tempted to ask the medician about where this fragment of alien DNA would have come from and how it would work. His insatiable hunger for information prompted him strongly; but outside the wall window of the lounge the last light was already gone from the sky, and he had an appointment to keep that Kaj must not know about or delay him from keeping.
“But you did say you’re feeling fine now?” Menowsky was asking, a little sharply.
“Certainly,” Bleys answered. “And didn’t you say I shouldn’t feel anything until the deadline?”
“You shouldn’t, as I say,” Menowsky said. “But it never hurts to check these things. If you notice any change in how you’re feeling, let me know immediately. Immediately. I understand we’re all leaving for the spaceship tomorrow sometime during the afternoon. Do you know if I’ll be in the same vehicle you are? I understand there may be some trouble getting to the ship.”
“We’re pretty sure there will be trouble,” said Bleys. “No, I don’t know if you’ll be in the car with me. Would you check with Henry MacLean on that, and explain why you need to be with me, if necessary? The arrangements on this are up to him. He’s the one who will make the decisions.”
“I absolutely should be with you,” Menowsky said.
Bleys looked at him closely.
“Medician,” Bleys said slowly, “how sure are you that I’m not going to feel the effect of what’s been put in me for some hours yet?”
“As sure as I can be! But no one can be a hundred percent certain when dealing with something that tinkers with basic elements in the human body, each one of which is individual.”
“Then you’re saying the chance I’ll need you is nothing more than a statistic? That makes you think you ought to be with me? Or is there something more that makes you sure—for instance, the information you’ve just gotten from your machines?”
“As a matter of fact, there is. I’d made a pretty good guess at the sort of drug they would use even before I first saw you, from what I know of their use of medical elements and the techniques they’ve used in the past. I thought they’d use it on you—one more evidence of their stupidity.”
“Stupidity?” Bleys repeated. “They looked intelligent enough to me.”
“They are intelligent, in their own areas,” said Kaj. “And they’re all fine—even brilliant—scientists, if not the real, rare breed of universe-beaters, any of them. But they’re stupid in their dealings with people. Being on the Council has done that to them. Authority does it to the best of humanity. It makes people arrogant and indifferent. Someone who uses any part of medicine purely to gain a personal end has lost most—or all—of his or her humanity. They become at least part-tyrant; and the longer they stay in power—and most of those people you saw have come back again and again to their Council chairs for some years—the more they become complete tyrants, until they’re no better than those ancient Old Earth rulers who used to torture or murder at will.”
Kaj had an odd, crisp way of talking. Not angry, in any way, but as if he was quite prepared to be angry if anybody else wanted to start an argument or fight; and this message managed to make itself heard in the way he spoke.
“All right,” said Bleys.
“I’m glad you see,” Kaj said. “I’ve seen a number of very good people destroyed by them, and now, finally, with you, I’m going to rob them of someone they want badly.”
His voice had not risen at all, but his eyes had grown even darker, like invisibly burning coals.
“Could that be why you volunteered to come with Will Sather?” Bleys asked.
“One of the reasons. As for knowing, I knew you were here, and I knew them. It was bound to happen.”
“All right,” said Bleys. “Simply tell Henry that you and I agreed I’d want you with me. I’ll leave now. I’ve got an appointment. Get your machines packed away, and I’ll turn off the security bubble.”
On his way back to his own private room, Bleys had to pass through a number of the rooms of his suite, any one of which Henry, Toni or Dahno might have been in—but none of them were.
It was still early in the evening, local time, about eight P.M.—twenty hours. They were, he thought, probably about the business of preparing for the attempt to reach the spaceport tomorrow; and those preparations had taken them out of the block completely. But it was time that he was getting to this other matter he had called an appointment.
An appointment it was, but one which the other parties had no suspicion of his attending. It was the Council meeting Sean O’Flaherty had mentioned as he and Bleys came back from the afternoon’s Council session.
Bleys’s own private lounge was a corner room, last of the long row of connecting chambers that made up this expensive suite. Two of the walls were transparent from inside, so that he could view almost a hundred-and-eighty-degree spread of the city lights in the dusk around and below him.
He had used the control pad on his wrist to keep the lights in the suite from turning on before he entered. Once he was through the door, he locked it behind him with another three-fingered touch on the pad, and waited. Gradually, his eyes began to adjust to the illumination that the city lights outside gave the room.
The long, rectangular space was shadowy and dim, but everything in it was clearly visible. In fact, with a little imagination, he could imagine it as bathed in soft moonlight—although neither of the moons of Newton were in the sky at the moment. The general glow of the lights outside made a strange but adequate substitute.
Bleys stood there a moment longer, thinking about his trademark cloak. He wanted to be impressive, but it was impractical; so he contented himself with his dark dress suit, including the red cummerbund presently fashionable on Newton. Its outside end was fastened to the layers wound underneath about his waist by a heavy, ornate clip, just where a belt buckle might have been. He moved.
By the glow of the city lights, Bleys walked to the doorway in one window wall which opened to the balcony there that gave a view along the flanking side of the building. He could now look directly toward the balcony belonging to the Council meeting room. He and Sean had made a turn at the start of their walk from his own lounge to the Council Room. But that had been because they had started from the main lounge, now behind him. From here, the way to the Council balcony was straight ahead.
A cool evening breeze laved his face and hands. He could not remember whether or not he had noticed this coolness of the night air when he had made his way along the side of the hotel in Ecumeny, that night when, wakeful, he had been driven to get as close as possible to the stars that had been his talisman from the beginning of memory. A night in which he had indeed been alone with them, until the people watching him from below had caused him to climb farther around the corner of that building.
Bleys remembered now how he had made the corner turn, with a reckless, swinging pivot on one foot that he had never tried before. No such turn would be necessary here. The climb should be a simple matter. He had already checked the possibilities. With the exception of his own suite on this floor, the building he was now in, unlike the one on Association, did not have balconies above balconies, with ridges midway between them, around the sides of it, as support for his toes and fingers.
But it had, in fact, something better for his need. Undoubtedly for reasons of architectural appearance, each of the top three floors here—of which his floor was the middle one—were stepped back, each from the one below, by a good twenty centimeters. So that he could travel along one of these step-backs as if he were on a ledge, twice as wide as one of his feet.
Even more useful, these three top, stepped-back stories each had a decorative panel along the building side from the lip
of each step-back and extending down a full meter and a half. They had the appearance of marble, several centimeters thick, a width of gold-streaked white stone, with carvings completely through them, wide and deep enough to be handholds. Each panel, from street level, gave the illusion of an ornamental cap on the step-back to which it was attached.
One of these step-backs ran directly below his balcony. He could step out on to that, and walk easily to the Council Room, holding on to the panel reaching down from the step-back above, and climbing over the intervening balconies on his way.
He had seen that sort of ornamental false cap before, when he had been a child, still with his mother, on one of the large private estates at which they had stayed for a while. The panel had been called a “fluted fascia,” in architectural terms.
In that past time, at one rich estate where they had been residents, he had used the holes of the carvings in the fascia to climb up from a garden into an open first-story window. He had been a great deal lighter then; but still, as he remembered, the fascia had been a firm part of the wall to which it was attached. It was unlikely these panels would not be anchored as firmly.
Bleys turned around and went into his sleeping room, next to the lounge. Stepping inside, he let the lights turn themselves on only after the door had closed behind him, so that no gleam would show in the lounge. He touched the controls on his wristpad, and the farther wall opened up to display his wardrobe.
Bleys crossed to it, picked out a pair of dark gray trousers and a long-sleeved, black shirt. His face would be to the outside wall of the building once he was on the ledge. There were gloves in the wardrobe, but he did not want anything between the sensitive skin of his fingers and whatever he was holding on to.
Feeling a sudden desire for a shower, he took off his clothes. It was a need of something symbolic to wash away the earlier part of the day from his mind, leave it clean and empty, ready to deal with the climb along the ledge. He stepped into the shower cubicle.
He touched the stud on his wrist control pad that should have brought a grateful small torrent of water cascading down on him. But instead, the cubicle seemed suddenly to swing sickeningly around him; so that, reflexively, he thrust out both hands against two of its opposite walls to keep himself from falling.
Abruptly the cubicle was normal again. Except that his skin now felt as if he had been wiped all over by something cool but dry, that had tingled slightly for a moment, but left him feeling unnaturally clean—as if he had been scraped over every inch of his body by the feather touch of a blade sharper than any ever invented. For a moment, he tensed in every muscle; then he realized that this hotel in its opulence had installed supersonic cleansers, something he should have expected in such a place. He was almost surgically dirtless, more so now than water could ever have made him.
But cleanliness had not been the reason he had decided to shower. He had wanted the feel of water washing away everything but his present single-minded purpose. Moreover, his years of self-training in sensitivity of his sensory reactions had made him unnaturally acute; and this kind of supersonic stimulation, mild as it was supposed to be, had destroyed his sense of balance momentarily. He looked at his wristpad, saw the possible alternate signal lit, there, and touched it.
Water, automatically set to his body temperature, poured down upon him. He turned his face gratefully up into it.
He stood for several minutes, letting the flood inundate him. Then, feeling remarkably refreshed and new, he punched the wristpad again and a waft of warm, desert-dry air flooded upon him from the walls of the cubicle, drying him.
He left the cubicle, dressed in the dark clothing and went about transferring the contents of his pockets to his fresh clothes. The shower had worked its symbolic as well as its physical effect. Even the unpleasant moment in which he had lost his balance was unimportant now. By interworld law, he knew, these cleansing cubicles were not supposed to have supersonic cleaners set high enough to be uncomfortable for any normal person. But, in that area, he was no longer normal. He would be careful to use the water option from now on.
Dressed once more, Bleys hesitated for a moment over the wide three-meter band of cloth that was the cummerbund, then wrapped and pinned it again around his waist.
If by chance he was caught doing what he planned, he preferred to appear a slightly insane hotel guest, rather than a prowler.
Back in the dimness of the lounge, he brought from one trouser pocket the small device, lost in his hand as it had been in Dahno’s, which produced the blue privacy bubble. He had borrowed it from Dahno at the end of (heir talk, earlier, with this climb in mind. The device’s controls were simple: a single stud, placed to slide in a groove, with three positions—one for off, one for on, and a third for hold.
Bleys slid the switch to on. A bubble began forming around him, growing and enclosing his whole body. He realized then that it would keep on growing unless he stopped it and slid the stud even farther to hold. The bubble ceased growing. He thumbed the switch back to off, the bubble vanished, and he stepped once more out on to the balcony, after putting the device back in his pocket.
He had trained himself to measure distance by a nearly automatic counting of his strides; and he had counted them both on the way to and from the Council meeting room. Now, looking along the side of the building, he estimated the room’s balcony to be distant some three-quarters of that side; and indeed, at a distance, he thought he could identify the precise balcony.
Bleys glanced around the dim, empty lounge. No one was likely to come looking for him for some hours at least. He looked down. There were only a few vehicles on the traffic way. The sky was clear. Neither one of Newton’s moons had risen, but the stars were brightly visible.
He put one hand on the top railing of the balcony and stepped over it with his right leg on to the step-back that ran beneath. On this climb he would travel facing the hotel wall, which would make the trip even easier. He reached up with his right hand and hooked his fingers into the cuttings of the fascia above him.
Bleys hesitated, one hand on the balcony, one on the fascia.
Both balcony and fascia were cold and hard to his touch. The trafficway was far below, and it, too, would be unyielding, cold and hard. The night air about him now felt colder, though the evening could hardly have cooled so quickly.
Bleys looked at the stars. They seemed remote, now, at their full astronomical distance; not only from him, but from each other. They no longer reached out to him like old friends, warming and welcoming in their community. They were specks of alien illumination, nothing more.
He looked along the way he would go, and an uneasiness niggled at him. It did not seem reasonable that a body like the Council should allow even so unlikely an access to their private meetings. It would not be difficult, even for someone noticeably shorter than he—given only a good tolerance of heights—to approach them secretly. Perhaps even this way was booby-trapped…
Then he realized it was the prospect of the climb itself that was making him hesitate. Earlier he had taken his ability to do so for granted, as he had climbed the wall of the Association hotel; but possibilities, both good and bad, were now thronging into his mind, and it came to him suddenly there was something missing here that had been in him at that other climb.
There he had been—not “berserk,” that word from the Old Earth language of the time of the Vikings. Perhaps “fey”—another old word which could have a number of meanings, but all connected with an awareness of the nearness—or chance—of death.
Some definitions for it had been “timid,” or “cowardly.” But neither of those had been right, then. Then it had been an adventure almost joyful, like looking forward confidently to a fight with a dark warrior. A test, preliminary to a greater test.
But whatever it had been then, it was not now. He felt very human and limited. He had never feared heights. He had merely been aware of them. But he was very aware of this one. An anger at himself kindled in him.
He stepped over the balcony with his other leg. The wall of the building, with all its transparent window-walls, stretched out before him, The windows were all dark, as he had counted on their being, with their occupants out, at this Newtonian dinner hour.
Bleys went forward, sideways, like a long-legged crab, climbing over the balconies in his way. As he went, his tension relaxed. Now, there was nothing but the step-back beneath his feet and the fascia in which he set his fingers. His long practice and exercise of self-control took over. Only he and the building existed.
He went forward, calmly—until, without warning, some inner alarm bell sounded, and he stopped.
It was nothing obvious, not a response of his trained sensory system. But it was a definite feeling, real but un-explainable; like that awareness called the “loom of the land,” that for centuries described sailors’ awareness of an unseen shore, out of sight still below the perfect, unbroken circle of watery horizon.
He pushed his forward foot farther, cautiously feeling for any change in the surface beneath it.
But there was only solid surface as far as his toes could reach. He pulled his foot back and slowly advanced his body, then stretched out his arm, sliding his fingers over the incised surface of the fascia, until they were farther out than his foot had been able to reach.
Abruptly, his fingertips slipped over an edge into emptiness. He looked at the apparently continuous surface there; and his fingertips now seemed buried in the marble.
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