Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 (44 page)

Dear Mr. Vice-Chairman,

Meet me at the hotel I mentioned in my last letter, in the Denver metropolitan area. I think, for business reasons you better bring along five of our tame Hounds. They may be needed.

I'll look forward to seeing you in about thirteen days, on the interstellar calendar.

The Chairman

He put the letter aside and picked up the phone. He called through to Ahram Moro at the Kennel. At that end there was a small wait, while one of the Hounds currently on duty sent for the Hound Master.

"Bleys Ahrens!" said Ahram, when he came on the line. "My Hounds are most grateful, most grateful indeed—I should say, your Hounds and Dahno's. But that dinner was a real treat for them."

"I'm glad they liked it," said Bleys, "because I've some unfortunate news for them. We're going to hold off indefinitely using the maneuver your men have been working on. I got an interstellar message from Dahno."

"Oh," said Ahram. There was a slight pause. Then his voice came on again, more cheerfully. "Yes, of course they'll be disappointed. But with your dinner to balance it off, I don't think any of them will be too upset."

"Five of them needn't be," said Bleys. "You've got the address of our office in Ecumeny?"

"In Ecumeny? Yes, Bleys Ahrens. I know it well."

"All right. Send five of your best Hounds to me there immediately. You'll probably have to hire a private plane so they can leave without delay. Tell them I want them here within three hours. I've got to leave the office now. But I'll be back in three hours."

"Three hours, Bleys Ahrens?"

"Three hours," said Bleys, "or they'll be left behind. Tell them pack—lightly—for an off-world trip."

"An off-world trip?" echoed Ahram, with a new note in his voice. "The ones who go will be the envy of all the rest!"

"I need them here in three hours, remember. Rent a car, aircraft, anything you need, buy anything you need. You'll be reimbursed."

"No need to worry about that, Bleys Ahrens," said Ahram.

"We have more than adequate funds on hand. This is a red-letter day."

"We'll hope so," said Bleys. "But—in any case, keep your mind on business. As I say, if those five Hounds aren't with me at the end of three hours, they'll be left behind. I'm going off-world myself and they're going with me."

"You're leaving too?" asked Ahram, incredulously.

"Only temporarily," said Bleys.

He noticed that the other man had not mentioned Norton as a source of interim orders. No doubt he was counting on hearing as usual from the legalist.

"But who will we get our orders from if you and Dahno are gone?"

"The
office will let you know," said Bleys. "Otherwise, just continue as usual. Good-bye for now, then."

He hung up, not waiting for Ahram's answering good-bye.

He got heavily to his feet. Then he remembered there was another phone call he had to make. He called the agency through which he had booked passage several days ago. The day staff not yet being there, he told the nightline that he required shipspace for five more travelers who would be going with him.

There was some confusion, some delay, and finally the voice of a man he had not spoken to before came over the phone to him.

"I'm sorry, Bleys Ahrens," the voice said regretfully, "but all space is booked. We couldn't find room for even one additional passenger, let alone five."

"For five thousand interstellar—note,
interstellar
—credits," said Bleys, "could you find space for five more?"

"I—" The voice broke off. "I'll have to call you back in a few minutes, Bleys Ahrens. What's your phone number at the moment?"

Bleys gave him the number of his office. But it was less than two minutes before the phone rang again and the same voice spoke to him, almost jubilantly.

"Five more spaces have been found, Bleys Ahrens," he said. "It seems that we overbooked, and I hadn't noticed it until just recently. So I had to tell five of the people who already had passage—the last five, that is—that we couldn't take them. Then I found out I'd miscounted. There's cabins available for five who are traveling with you."

"Thank you," said Bleys.

"Not at all, Bleys Ahrens, our pleasure."

Bleys broke the connection and gave a short, bitter laugh in the silence of his office. He was about to leave for his own apartment to do what little packing he meant to do, when he noticed Dahno's message, again.

His laugh came again; and it was only when he realized there was a slightly bitter note to it, that he forced himself to stop laughing abruptly. He went out the door.

CHAPTER 37

These days, with
modern spaceship travel, what the passenger subjectively experienced was simply a going up into the star-filled darkness of space; then, to all the limits of perception, seeming to stand still there for a number of days, until finally descending at the world of their destination.

Consequently, the spaceships carried as much as possible by way of entertainment, so long as it did not use up too much valuable space, since the cost of carriage was so high.

There were approximately five meals available every day, all fixed by the best of chefs, and tailored to the tastes of whatever world the individual passenger had come from. There were unlimited alcoholic drinks. There was a small game room and a small gambling room, both jammed with almost every device people might want.

Unfortunately, Bleys had never been greatly interested in food, except as a necessary fuel when his stomach felt empty; he could drink but intoxication was only an irritation to him—he wanted his mind clear
to think at all times. Gambling
bored him. He could imagine an addiction to alcohol more easily than he could imagine an addiction to games of chance.

This caused no particular hardship for him, however, because his mind was always hungry, always busy; and he was perfectly content to sit for several days and simply work with what he knew. One reason for this was the fact that planning what he would need to do, to bring about the startling upheaval and change in the human race that he had originally dreamed of, was an immensely complicated arrangement of events. And there was no end to the planning that had to go into that, simply because he worked with a continually-shifting situation on the part of the human race.

On the other hand, he could not see how he could fail if he simply decided to remain steadfast and committed to his goal. Things would have to be done that were repugnant. But they must be done when the time came.

Norton Brawley had needed to be taken out of the picture. He would have needed to be taken out of it eventually, no matter what else had happened. McKae's upcoming speech had simply precipitated matters.

In the ship's lounge, he looked at the starscreen and once more felt the cold but peaceful comfort of being firmly on the outside of the race and its worlds, working toward an end that the human race must come to, or perish, in the long run. His killing of Brawley had finally put him, he felt, outside all other human society. Now where there had been the nerve-endings of ethics in him, there was nothing. No more uncertainties, only the never-ending test of his will.

With this thought, he felt ready to go on. The next uncomfortable point would be acquainting Dahno with Brawley's death. But, that too must be done.

His confidence about this did not waver, even when at last they landed on Old Earth. For, unlike Dahno, he had been fortunate enough to get a ship that was going directly from Association to the Mother World.

He was also pleased to find that the prospect of his seeing Dahno again did not cause him to worry about that meeting, but simply made him more eager to reach it.

The Shadow Hotel turned out to be about eighty miles west of the original site of the city of Denver. It was in some ways no more luxurious than some of the hotels he had been in before. But there was a difference there, a difference that it was hard to put your finger on. It was just a little taller and had, somehow, a more permanent feeling than any of the buildings he had been in on the New Worlds, including those that were the heart of governments, such as the Chamber on Association.

Old Earth was not only the cradle of the human race; but the fact that those alive on it now knew this, made them—Bleys found the word a little odd, but it was the only one that described it—more
solid
in their own estimation, in what they built and what they did.

It was something that should have put a slight chip on Bleys' shoulder, child as he was of one of the newer worlds. But curiously, it did not. Instead, it was reassuring.

With his five Hounds in tow he paused in the lobby of the soaring building to call up to Dahno's suite; and heard his half-brother's voice tell them all to come up right away.

They did.

"Come in, come in," boomed Dahno's voice cheerfully from the annunciator over the door, when they pressed the door button. They stepped into a long, large room that seemed to be almost all window; and even had some of its ceiling slanted backwards, with a skylight in it. Either this room projected from the body of the hotel or the hotel narrowed as it got to its higher levels, where they were now. Bleys rather thought the second.

Dahno waved toward a buffet with food and drink on it. "Help yourselves," he said.

He was on his feet to clasp hands with Bleys; and Bleys found a curious pleasure in talking again to somebody whose eyes were on a level with his own. The five Hounds had taken Dahno's invitation at its face value and were busy at the buffet. But Bleys ignored it.

"Let's sit down," said Bleys. "I've got a lot to tell you."

"Oh?" Dahno said. His brown eyes were penetrating on
Bleys. "Come over here then. I've got a little side room we can step into."

The side room was not all that little, but it had been built to give an effect of coziness, with the walls covered with a bas-relief tapestry, the carpet deep, mounting partway up the walls of the room; and the chairs, Bleys was interested to see, tailored to his and Dahno's proportions.

Dahno led him to a facing pair of such armchairs by a window, and waved Bleys into one, while he took the other.

"Go ahead," he said, "bring me up to date."

"Norton Brawley is dead," said Bleys, bluntly. "He had plans to take over the organization for his own use."

"Oh?" said Dahno, but his voice did not echo the surprise that the word might have indicated. "Who killed him?"

"I did," said Bleys, "when he came to kill me."

Dahno nodded slowly.

"I'd had my eye on him for a little while, I must admit," said Dahno, thoughtfully. "One of the problems was that while he was a mixed-breed, he wasn't one of our trainees; just someone I got to know after I moved into Ecumeny. He was already in practice as a legalist. But the man was clearly ambitious—in fact if he hadn't been, he wouldn't have been that useful to me. Any danger of his death being traced back to the organization?"

"I don't really think so," said Bleys. Briefly, he told exactly what had happened when Brawley had come to his office that early morning, with the two men.

"Yes," said Dahno, when he had finished listening. He nodded. "Probably better now than later as far as Norton went. But I'm interested in why you thought that the attempt to knock out McKae should be canceled. I don't remember saying anything about your doing that, even if things looked unlikely, before I left."

"No," said Bleys, "of course you didn't. But then you left in rather a hurry. What made up my mind for me was that I infiltrated McKae's own security force—"

He told Dahno about his experiences with the individuals of the McKae camp.

"What it wound up being," Bleys said, "was a lopsided situation in which I didn't see any real chance of the Hounds pulling it off; and it would have been too open a gun battle to keep out of the papers. So
...
it was a situation that called for a decision at the moment. I decided."

"Yes," said Dahno, "I can't fault you for making the decision. Also, it sounds like the kind of decision I'd have had to make if I'd been there at the time. I was a little bit concerned about things, which was one reason that I decided to buy your idea of a larger and more ambitious future."

He slapped his knee, as if dismissing everything that had happened.

"Now, about the meeting," he said. "After looking at the situation here, I've come to the conclusion that Earth's security system is so large and fast that we couldn't even rent a place, or use hotel space for our meeting, without having the authorities around asking questions before our chairs were warm. Crazy as it sounds, our best chance to meet undisturbed will be to simply take over a private estate, rather than trying to rent, or even buy, one to meet in. It'll leave fewer tracks for us to be traced by—particularly if we make a swift move in, a quick meeting, a swift move out—and an immediate departure from Earth. That leaves no time for anyone to catch on to us. And if there is any fuss, we'll already be off-planet as well as unidentifiable. So whatever happens here, Earth won't be shut off to us after this. The ship of your new plans can still be launched."

Bleys noted, with an inner interest, that Dahno was already referring to Old Earth simply as Earth. It might mean nothing. On the other hand, it might mean an immediate response on Dahno's part to Old Earth's importance.

"Now, the place I've picked out," said Dahno, "is a bit further west from here, fairly high in the mountains and isolated. It's got a strange reason for existence. It seems about fourteen years ago an empty small spacecraft was found drifting near Earth, with a two-year old boy named Hal Mayne aboard. No adults at all."

'N
o adults?" echoed Bleys. "But was the boy alive?"

"Yes, and there were instructions left for how he was to be taken care of," said Dahno, "and saying that the ship and its contents could be sold to finance that care. You know what any kind of deep-space craft is worth, even though this was somewhat out of date."

"Much out of date?" asked Bleys.

Dahno smiled.

"They figured that its design went back to the kind of spacecraft they were building eighty years ago," he answered. "A puzzle, eh? At any rate, sold, the craft brought in enough Old Earth currency to buy the land, put up the building and hire three tutors for the boy."

"How old's he now?" asked Bleys.

"Sixteen," said Dahno.

Sixteen,
thought Bleys—only three years younger than Will MacLean when he had died on Ceta. But Dahno was going on.

"The isolation's perfect for our use," he was saying. "I'll give you an air map and complete details; and I want you and the five Hounds to go there tomorrow and take it over. I'll come in late tomorrow myself, and I'll expect to find you have the place under control. Don't hurt anyone. Just lock them up in a room where they can't alert the local law, and you and I'll
simply persuade them to host u
s for a couple of days."

He paused to smile at Bleys. "With our talents, we should have no trouble making them glad to have us."

Bleys kept silence, and after a moment Dahno continued, "I've left word for the other Vice-Chairmen, when they get to the hotel here tomorrow, how to find their way out for the meeting. We'll have an afternoon meeting, and either turn the people loose again or make it possible for them to get loose from whatever room we've penned them up in within a few hours. Then we'll head right for Denver spaceport. I already have passage for all the Vice-Chairmen, you, I and the Hounds. So we'll take off, at the latest, the morning after we have our get-together."

"How many people are there at this place?" asked Bleys.

"Just the boy"—Dahno waved one hand to indicate the unimportance of the numbers
—"and the three old men who are
his tutors, one Dorsai, one from Harmony, I believe, and one Exotic. All very old men. The house itself is completely automated." He grinned at Bleys.

"The boy's an orphan—like you and me, Mr. Vice-Chairman," he said. He got to his feet.

"I'll show you a layout of the house and tell you more about the people there, after we've got the Hounds settled," he said. "I've already got rooms reserved for them. We'll put them in, two to a room here. That should be good enough for them, under campaign conditions; and this is hardly an uncomfortable hotel, even its smallest guest rooms."

Bleys found himself wondering about the boy, Hal Mayne.