and the man walked back up to them. He ignored Bleys and spoke directly and fiercely to Dahno.

"You shouldn't even be in this building!" the man snapped.

Close up, Bleys saw that it was his extra weight that had made him look no more than middle age. Actually, he must be at least high in his fifties or even older.

"It's just a matter of time! We'll get you ruled out of here!"

"I'm sorry I'm in the way," said Dahno.

"You're not sorry at all. You're one of God's outcasts and incapable of feeling sorry!" retorted the fat man. His gaze switched suddenly to Bleys.

"Who's this?"

"My brother, Bleys Ahrens. And partner," said Dahno.

"He'll be kept out too! Anyone connected with you or knows you, shouldn't be here!"

He turned about and stamped off once more in the direction in which he had been headed when they had emerged from the gallery.

Dahno looked down at. Bleys and smiled a little.

"A few enemies are inevitable," he said softly. "Now, we'll swing by the office; and I'll see what's going on there."

So they went to Dahno's office. It was the first time Bleys had been in the place since that long-ago first long weekend with Dahno. But it was as if he had stepped out only five minutes before. The same two women were at the same two desks working through reams of paper, reading them, making notes and dropping the pieces of paper they had read, which Bleys now saw were message transcripts, into a flare box beside their desks, so that they were instantly converted to ash.

Dahno led the way toward the further door to his interior office, but Bleys turned abruptly, walked over to the nearest desk and began examining the pile of so-far unread messages there.

"Dahno Ahrens!" shouted the woman behind the desk, reaching out to cover the two piles with her hands.

Bleys looked over at Dahno, who smiled a little wickedly.

"That's all right, Aran"," he said, "this is my half-brother and partner, remember? Let him look."

Reluctantly, and still looking shocked, the woman withdrew her hands from the piles of messages. Intrigued, Bleys paged through them. They were all in code. He studied every one he came to for a moment. Then he let go, nodded and smiled at Arah, and went back to Dahno, who led him into the further office.

Dahno sat down behind the large desk which was now piled with neat stacks of paper, nowhere near as high or as loose as the ones on the desks of the two women outside. Bleys took one of the overstuffed armchairs.

"Be with you in a moment," said Dahno.

Bleys watched as Dahno rapidly read through the stacks of paper on his desk. Dahno did not read, Bleys noticed, quite as quickly as he himself did—but then the material might be something that required more minute attention. Dahno sat back and punched a button on his desk control pad.

"All right," he said, "you can come in and collect everything now, Arah."

The woman who had been behind the desk where Bleys had examined the pictures came in and gathered up the papers from Dahno's desk. She gave Bleys a tentative smile, and carried the papers out. Dahno rose.

"And now," he said to Bleys, "I want to get you enrolled with the rest of my executives-in-training."

He led the way out as he had led it in. In the white hovercar they moved through the streets again, streets now beginning to fill with traffic as the afternoon grew late, and drove until they came to a place that Bleys remembered—the apartment building in the rather run-down district.

This time there were none of the trainees in the front room relaxing, with drinks or otherwise. Dahno led the way on through and they came at last on the inhabitants of this place in the gym, clearly undergoing martial arts training under the eye of a brown, quiet man about five feet nine or ten, who in spite of his unremarkable size radiated a remarkable air of physical competence.

"Sit down," Dahno said to Bleys, himself taking a seat in the first tier of benches against the wall. Bleys sat down beside him.

They sat for a short while, watching. Bleys had had brief periods of instruction from various instructors, in combative sports, Earth-traditional martial arts, and combat systems that had grown up on several worlds. If the ongoing session was typical, the instruction here tended toward Earth-traditional systems. Right at the moment, the students were practicing one of the more basic judo hip throws, while the instructor walked among them offering encouragement or criticism or demonstrating some fine detail that defied verbal explanation. Bleys couldn't recall the name of the technique, if he had ever known it.

After a few moments, the instructor clapped his hands and the students separated and lined up along the edge of the practice surface.

"Randori. Fifteen minutes. Hajimer

So, thought Bleys, remembering the judo training he had had while still with his mother. This sensei was a traditionalist. Old-Earth Japanese.

The students paired off and began their free-exercise session. Bleys liked this aspect of the training less. From the one or two vid-tapes he had seen, he suspected that the exacting discipline of the formal kata led to deeper understanding and mastery: There was a beauty to a kata, properly done, like the beauty he had found in a mathematical proof.

The instructor detached himself from the class and walked over to where Dahno and Bleys were.

Dahno had risen to his feet as the other approached and Bleys followed his example. As the instructor came up to stop before them, Dahno inclined his head briefly and the instructor did the same. Bleys, aware at least of this much of ordinary dojo courtesy, bent his own head more deeply.

"Sensei," Dahno said, "this is my brother, Bleys Ahrens. I would appreciate his being trained up to the level of these others, or beyond if he wishes."

The dark brown eyes of the sensei turned on Bleys.

"He's had some bits and pieces of instruction in martial arts," said Dahno—surprising Bleys, who had no idea of how Dahno could have discovered that.

"Tell me," said the sensei to Bleys, "in your own words, what have you been taught?"

Bleys thought it politic to identify only the traditional systems to which he had been exposed. Most traditional instructors had a rather parochial contempt for the eclectic and synthetic combat systems that had sprouted in such profusion on the New Worlds. Apart from this judicious editing, Bleys told him as concisely as possible that he had had several periods of training not more than three months at the longest, two periods concerned with judo, one in karate and about three weeks in an aikido dojo, which he greatly preferred.

"What I teach in these classes," the sensei told him, speaking as if Dahno were not there at all, directly to Bleys, "is the three disciplines you've encountered, and one or two that are more obscure. It is regrettable that your learning has been so unsystematic, but it is good that you began young. Students who begin early have fewer bad habits to overcome when they take up serious training. Do you have a do-giV

"He has," spoke Dahno from the sidelines as it were, "I had one put in a locker for him here. Locker number forty-two."

"Put it on," said the sensei, "and we'll see if you remember how to fall."

Bleys found the training uniform and put it on. The trousers tied at the waist with a drawstring and were cut from an unbleached white cloth that was as heavy and stiff as the work pants he'd worn on Uncle Henry's farm. The jacket was a loose white robe that fell about the middle of his thigh. It was sewn from a coarsely woven fabric and was heavily reinforced around the collar and lapels with a wide strip of the same cloth as the trousers. He was pleased that he recalled how to tie the long, quilted belt that held the jacket from hanging open. He was not surprised that the belt was a plain, unbroken white, although those on the practice floor wore belts of various colors, but none black. Only the sensei himself wore, not only a black belt, but a black do-gi that was otherwise of the same pattern and dimensions as Bleys' own.

Bleys came back and stood on the sidelines where he had stood before. Dahno had disappeared and Bleys stood waiting, feeling a little overwhelmed—almost a little, shy in the presence of this group.

The sensei paid no attention to him for a short while. The other students were going through a grappling kata that Bleys did not recognize, working in pairs. Most of them were down on the mats after taking a formal, stylized throw and struggling there for an advantage. None of them seemed to look at him directly, but Bleys caught momentary glimpses directed at him; and he felt very strongly the feeling he had felt when he had first stepped into the front room of this establishment. Those in training here felt no kindness toward him. There was an obvious aura of resentment from them.

If the sensei felt this too, he completely ignored it. After a while he called a halt to what was going on and beckoned Bleys toward him. When Bleys came up to him he led him to one of the men wearing a brown belt, a tall man not quite Bleys' height but clearly in his early twenties at least and obviously outweighing Bleys by something upwards of twenty pounds.

"This is James," said the sensei to Bleys, "and, James—this is Bleys. I want you to work with him for a while."

James was a broad-shouldered man with a shock of blond hair and a square face. He did not smile at Bleys, but inclined his head in a bow. Bleys matched the bow.

The sensei went back and addressed the class.

"We'll work on combinations now. Easy throws followed by either katame-waza, joint-lock technique, or shime-waza, strangle technique. Don't fight your partner's throws. The throw is just an entry into the arm-bar or the choke."

"Hajime!" It was the command to begin.

James smiled at Bleys and bowed. It was not a particularly welcoming or friendly smile.

Bleys remembered to return the bow before reaching for James' sleeve and lapel. The fundamentals came back naturally. Don't grip the lapel too tightly; don't pick up your feet, slide them—but not too close together. It was almost a dance.

Tentatively, Bleys stepped into position for a basic hip throw. James' arm on his lapel suddenly became rigid, and Bleys stumbled backward, momentarily off balance. He looked at his partner inquiringly. The sensei had said not to fight the throw. James' face was innocently impassive.

Bleys relaxed. All right, he, Bleys, would take the first fall. James made no attempt to throw him, but worked his right hand up Bleys' lapel so that he now gripped the collar behind Bleys' neck. Bleys could feel the knuckle of his partner's thumb against the base of his skull. With his own hand no longer snugged against James' chest, he could not stiff-arm the other and keep him away. Once again Bleys twisted his body sideways and slid forward to attempt a throw.

As he did, James shifted his left hand from Bleys' sleeve to the left lapel of his do-gi and snaked his right forearm over Bleys' head, while keeping his grip on the collar. The brown belt scissored his crossed forearms, pressing them against Bleys' carotid arteries. Bleys remembered the technique— gyaku-juji-shime, reverse cross strangle.

Bleys was turned away from James and half bent over. When he jerked to straighten up he felt his legs swept out from under him. He was too startled to remember to slap the mat to break his fall, and the painful impact knocked the last of his air out of his lungs.

Bleys made up his mind to hang on for as long as possible in hopes that he might at least make a good impression upon the other trainees and the sensei.

Very swiftly, however, he felt his senses leaving him. His peripheral vision clouded with a red haze as his brain, deprived of blood through its two main arteries, became starved for oxygen. At the edge of unconsciousness, he released James' sleeve and tapped lightly on the other's arm, the signal of surrender.

But the pressure was not relaxed. He tapped again, more urgently. But still the pressure remained.

Then, as he began to slide completely into unconsciousness, Bleys found awareness coming back to him. James had released the hold momentarily. Bleys was just beginning to feel a sense of relief when the pressure was resumed; and once more he began to slip into unconsciousness.

Again, he went almost into, if not completely into it before James let him up. This time, as soon as Bleys was able to do so he gasped out one word.

"Dahno."

Almost magically, it was so instantaneous, the hold was relaxed completely.

Bleys lay where he was for a moment, simply recovering. His mind had saved him from what promised to be a very rough initiation indeed. James had been taking this opportunity to express the group's resentment against Bleys' supposedly favored status. But he had obviously not thought it through that .Bleys had Dahno's ear; and might tell the huge man of what had been done to him. In which case, James himself might suffer.

After a bit Bleys stirred, pushed himself up on one elbow and then got to his feet. James rose with him.

Following that, James offered only token resistance to Bleys' throws and performed his own throws with suitable restraint, following them with grappling techniques that were quickly applied and released on Bleys' signal. At all times now, James' handling of him was considerate, not to say delicate. This went on for another fifteen minutes or so, when the exercise class was at last dismissed by the sensei.

Bleys walked over to his locker to hang up his do-gi and change back into his ordinary clothes. He was a little disappointed that the sensei had shown no sign of seeing what had happened. He felt sure that if he had, he would have put a stop to it right at the very beginning. On the other hand, perhaps his treatment had actually been instigated by the sensei to test him.

In either case, the episode would have to go unreported. It went against Bleys' grain to actually complain to Dahno. Besides, Bleys was sure doing so would not raise him in his brother's eyes. And it was not beyond possibility that the incident had been Dahno's idea. Plainly, he would have to conquer the trainees' dislike of him on his own.

Dahno had reappeared by this time, as if he knew—which probably he did—when the class was due to end. He led Bleys back out.

"Tomorrow, you'll start joining them not only in the exercise classes but in the classroom sessions," he told Bleys as they walked toward the front of the building and the door that would let them out to the elevator.

"You'll find that the sort of thing they're being taught is something you could learn on your own in a fraction of the time, given someone experienced to work with and the necessary books. But I want you to spend some time with them anyway and get to know them. Above all, they've got to get to know you. We aren't going to emphasize from the first that you're destined for a higher position with me than any of them are. They've probably guessed it; but I want it to sink in as a fact on them gradually."

He smiled at Bleys; and Bleys heard the unspoken order. He would have to dominate these men before Dahno would publicly acknowledge any superiority in him.

He had begun talking as soon as they were outside the apartment and beyond the earshot of anyone within. They had taken the lift down and were back in the car before he spoke again.

"I've got things to do," he said, "but I'll drop you off at home. Undoubtedly, you'll find something there to amuse yourself with."

"Yes," said Bleys.

Dahno smiled again, looking at the road ahead. Curiously, Bleys thought, in his smile this time there was something like a touch of genuine pleasure.

CHAPTER 18

Dahno did not even come up to the apartment with Bleys; he merely reached across, opened the door and said, "I've got to get going." He drove off.

Bleys rode up on the elevator, his mind still full of the problem of settling in with the other trainees at the dojo. He had considered the possibility, in fact the certainty, that sooner or later he would have to arrange to dominate in his own right all those whom Dahno could dominate. This, before he could think of possibly coming to any kind of a conclusion with Dahno himself. He had not thought confrontation with one of the trainees would come quite so soon.

There was a classic Exotic pattern for this sort of situation normally. It consisted first of making friends individually with everybody concerned; and then gradually allowing his natural superiority to show until he was accepted by all in a leadership position. A problem in this instance would be the fact that he could not start making friends until he had first mended matters between himself and James. Otherwise with each new friend

he made James would be pushed further and further into dislike and enmity.

Dislike could be a reaction, not only toward those who had acted unfairly toward you, but those to whom you had acted unfairly. In the latter case, dislike served as an excuse to yourself for what you had done. What James would need would be some excuse for what he had done that would remove his need to personally dislike Bleys.

By the time he had reached this point in his thoughts, Bleys had also let himself into the apartment. He put the whole matter of James, the do jo and the rest of the trainees out of his mind. He had learned early that one of the most valuable abilities to cultivate was that of being able to concentrate exclusively on any problem he wanted to solve. To put out of his mind absolutely what he did not want to intrude on his thoughts. It was the habit of dividing different problems into compartments where they could be forgotten while others were attended to.

Now there was other work to be done.

He searched around the apartment until he found in a writing desk a pile of sheets with Dahno's letterhead on them, obviously there for correspondence purposes. They were of a plastic so well made that it had the very feel of paper itself, an expensive version of such to find on one of the Younger Worlds.

He took a stack of these back to the dining table with him and sat down, placing the stack upside down so that he had the blank back of each sheet to work on. With this and the desk pen in hand, he concentrated on the blank sheets; and began to key in his memory of the messages he had looked at in Dahno's office.

Bleys did not have a natural eidetic memory. But both of his own intention, and with Exotic techniques he had been taught at his mother's insistence, he had cultivated into permanence the extremely tenacious memory of early childhood; and supplemented that with a version of autohypnosis, so that in nearly all cases he was able to summon up a visual picture in his mind of what he wanted to remember.

He envisioned the first message he had scanned in Dahno's office and copied down the symbols and letters that had been there. Then he put that message from his mind and went on to copy the next, until all were written out.

He ended up with some twenty sheets of coded messages. He compared these and made counts of the number of times of reappearances of the same symbols, and particularly the same symbols in conjunction with other symbols, and began to try breaking the code.

It turned out not to be extremely difficult. Bleys liked doing puzzles; and the code was a simple commercial one, not meant to stand up under intensive decoding efforts. Within a little more than a couple of hours he had reduced all the messages to plain ordinary Basic, the language spoken on all the Younger Worlds; and understood, if not spoken by, a majority of the people on Old Earth.

He took a break, made himself a sandwich, got a glass of juice and brought these back to the table where he could eat and drink while studying the messages.

The interesting thing was that the messages were cryptic in themselves. They were all very short. Their contents meant nothing to Bleys in most cases because he did not know what use Dahno had for the information in them.

He could make guesses and that was all. For example, the first one he looked at said briefly:

"V. (That could stand for variform—there were almost none of the New Worlds on which an edible plant, fish or animal existed that was not originally of Old Earth and had needed to have been genetically tailored to the planet's non-Earth environment) winter wheat up twelve points."

It was very obviously a bit of news that Dahno could somehow put to use in counseling one of the people he advised here on Association. It was also obviously a quotation from a commodities market report of the world it came from.

Bleys looked at the point of sending, printed at the top of the letter; which, uncoded, now read "New Earth." He could think of nothing in common between the climates and growing conditions of New Earth under the star of Sirius A, and Association under Epsilon Eridani, that would make agricultural information from one valuable on the other—but undoubtedly there was a reason that lay beyond the area of his present knowledge.

It was the same with the rest of the messages. They were all now comprehensible; but they were also obscure. None of them asked questions, all of them reported facts. Facts which Dahno would certainly be putting to use in the sorting and computing equipment of that research-equipped room off his own personal office, that he had shown Bleys on their first trip to that location.

Struck by a sudden thought, Bleys went through the pile again, this time paying attention to the places from which the messages had been sent.

He found the result interesting.

Of the fifteen New Worlds over half were represented as sources from which Dahno was getting mail. Mentally Bleys compiled a list of Newton, Cassida, New Earth, Freiland, Harmony, Ste. Marie and Ceta. That made, with the addition of Association, the world he was on right now, and which was obviously Dahno's headquarters, a total of eight of the fifteen Younger Worlds, on which Dahno had connections.

This plainly revealed a much larger organization than Bleys had imagined his brother to control. It was also pretty good evidence that this set of trainees was not the first that had been sent out.

Bleys decided that the whole intent of Dahno's activities called for further investigation.

He did not have a key to the office as he had one to the apartment. He glanced at the wrist monitor that Dahno had given him, and asked it for the time. The answer came back—twenty-seven minutes after three of the afternoon. Provided Dahno himself was not using his office right now, there should only be the two women on duty; and Dahno had already established Bleys' right of entry and action to them.

Accordingly, Bleys called an autocar service and thirty minutes later an automatically programmed hovercar delivered him to the front door of the building in which Dahno's office was located.

He went up to the office and entered, smiling, through the door, waving at the two women at their desks as he passed and heading for the entrance to Dahno's private office.

"We're closing up in about five minutes, Bleys Ahrens," the one called Aran called after him. He checked and turned about, still with his smile.

"You go right ahead," he said, "I'll wait for Dahno in his office."

Turning, he went on through the door into Dahno's office and closed it behind him.

It was not at all the office he was interested in, however, but the equipment room beyond its one wall. He let himself into this, and went about examining the various computing and other equipment that was there. Sitting down before a screen, he pressed the button that summoned the machine's attention and began asking questions.

It was not a quick process. It took him nearly an hour merely to establish the limits of the area in which Dahno had stored sensitive information. But there remained available a wealth of information that was peripheral to what was held secret, and from which Bleys' quick brain could deduce much.

In the next three hours he was able to establish that the organization Dahno controlled called itself the "Others." It had apparently grown spontaneously out of an essentially social association among people who were the result of intermarriage between individuals from the three largest Splinter Cultures in the New Worlds—the Friendlies, the Exotics, and the Dorsai. Dahno had joined this organization and effectively taken it over, turning it into a business tool.

Following that, he had begun gathering more recruits from the mixed-breeds, although non-mixed were by no means excluded if they were useful; and started educating class after class of these, like the group of trainees Bleys had already had to do with. On graduation, these were then sent to one or other of the New Worlds, to spread out individually to the larger cities of these worlds and set up their own satellite organizations which now sought influence there and useful information to channel back to him.

The organization had something of the old-fashioned information network about it. The sort of pattern that had allowed eighteenth and nineteenth century banks to make fortunes by communicating special information before it was received by other, slower routes. Also, it had something in common with the networks of spy cells during the turbulent times of the twentieth century when the large nations of Old Earth struggled and fought with each other on a massive basis. However, they were in fact much more tightly organized than either of these prototypes; kept tightly in Dahno's grasp by the fact that the organization's aim and purpose was to make use of, not wealth, but information—information that would give the organization—and particularly Dahno—power on these worlds.

It was Dahno's thesis, which he always announced to the graduating members of his group just before they left for the worlds of their destination, that wealth and power would come automatically if the information was first found. He further emphasized the point that the information would be useless unless it was processed by a central mind of unusual quality— which was his.

The structure would not have worked, Bleys thought, if anyone with abilities less than Dahno's had tried to run it.

In fact, his abilities made possible something otherwise impossible for more than a single world—a network that potentially allowed him to simultaneously influence the leadership of Association, as well as other Younger Worlds.

This had only been made possible by Donal Graeme, a century before, forcing these worlds to join peacefully in a community with a common economic base. This allowed the individual world to specialize safely in the type of specialists it trained; and trade these for the other specially trained people they needed from other worlds.

This in turn was possible because it was cheaper than trading anything else, given the high cost of interstellar travel. Also it allowed a world, by specializing, to devote only a small

proportion of its population to high levels of training, leaving the rest to make use of the fruits of the labors of the experts imported in return. In sum, this was what made possible the worlds as not merely surviving, but progressing social entities.

Otherwise, an overwhelming majority of their populations would have had to have been assigned to training in a multitude of necessary areas; so that the world would struggle merely to maintain itself.

It also allowed civilization to develop—and develop at more or less a common level on the fifteen Younger Worlds. Only one of those worlds—Coby—traded anything of importance in addition to experts. That was simply because it happened to be a planet of great interior riches in the form of metals and other substances badly needed on worlds which were naturally poor in their own supplies of these things.

But it was time to return to the apartment. Bleys closed up and left, after calling for an autocar.

Bleys' monitor spoke up just as he entered the apartment, to warn him that it was getting close to dinner time. It was possible that Dahno might swing by the apartment to pick him up and take him out to that favorite restaurant of his for dinner. All the time he had been working, Bleys had kept an ear cocked, metaphorically speaking, against the unexpected entrance of Dahno.

It had started to rain outside, and Bleys watched the day fade on the rain-blurred vegetation beyond the large windows of the outer wall of the main room. The planet Association was both close to its primary and strongly inclined to its ecliptic, and therefore had a short year—of about eighty days—which included a very hot summer of a couple of weeks' duration, and a longer winter.

Outside of the sheltered cities, nobody really attempted much in the summer. Farmers worked to grow and harvest their genetically-tailored crops in the remaining days of the year. Most of the planet's land-mass was in the temperate or tropical zones, the poles having little land, and that usually lying under sheets of ice or standing water, depending on the season.

Winter, where Bleys now was, therefore, was a time of long twilights and a good deal of rain like that which was now falling. He waited it out, however, until it was dark. It was obvious by that time that Dahno was not coming. Bleys made himself a meal from the kitchen equipment in the apartment; and then, for the day had been long, he took himself to bed. Experience had taught him that he would gain as much by sleeping on the information he had acquired and letting his unconscious sort it out, as he would by staying awake and trying to puzzle it.

He slept heavily. When he woke, there was a message for him on the screen of his bedside phone. It was from Dahno.

If you'd asked me, it read, I'd have given you a key to the office. You'll find it at the base of the phone here.

—Bleys looked, and indeed the key was there.

I've taken the liberty of setting your alarm. You've got a couple of hours, then at nine o'clock each day like this during the five weekdays, you're due to join the trainees for all the various phases of their education.

As far as their classroom work is concerned, I've left copies of the books they are studying with your reader on the dining table.

Dahno

Showered and dressed, Bleys made himself breakfast and sat in the dining room, eating and scanning the books that had been left for him, in the reader Dahno had laid out for him—although he could have used his own reader in his bedroom, if necessary. But this was closest.

He was able to get through most of them by the time he decided he had to call the driverless taxi to take him to the building that housed the trainees.

The morning, he discovered, was devoted to book work in the classroom. The books he had been given, he had been surprised to see, had been concerned almost exclusively with information about the various worlds that would be the destination of this particular class.

It seemed to him that that was rather one-sided preparation for the kind of work that he had expected would occupy most of those in Dahno's network eventually. But he discovered what made up the difference. There were specialized teachers for those subjects he had assumed they would need to know.

When they came to the final hour of the morning the instructor that had been dealing with them left and was replaced by another, a pleasant-faced man in his sixties, who had something of the Exotic about him but was—Bleys was ready to swear—no full-blooded Exotic.

There had been a general feeling, an attitude to his mother, who of course had been full-blooded Exotic, that set her apart from other people. It was similar to but not the same thing as the overall impression given by people who have gone deeply into certain occupations, and who seem marked by that occupation—experienced teachers often had something about them that made them sound and look as if teaching was their lifework, long-time physicians to sound and look like medicians. This man did not seem to radiate the Exotic special aura.

He lacked that. Possibly he too was an Other, a second-generation mixture of Exotic and something else. But, whatever his antecedents, he did know a number of the Exotic developed techniques in hypnosis and persuasion.

Particularly those of persuasion, since it had always been preached by Exotics, according to what Bleys had read and what his mother had confirmed one time when he had ventured to ask her, that hypnosis, except an individual's self-hypnosis as a memory aide, was a technique of last resort.

The instructor confined himself to ways of getting and holding attention; and to ways of further improving upon that attention so that it gradually developed into a susceptibility for persuasion. He stressed the necessity of referring to things that the one addressed would either find or already believe to be incontrovertible.

Without warning he suddenly addressed himself directly to Bleys.

"Now, do you have anything to say to that, Bleys Ahrens?" he asked, from the lecture platform.

Bleys felt the eyes of the class upon him. Now was not the time for him to begin showing any of his abilities or superiorities.

"No . . ."he said, thoughtfully, "no, I don't think so."

"You'll notice," the instructor once more addressed the class as a whole, "how I succeeded in focusing the attention of all of you upon Bieys Ahrens. Now, if he was as qualified as I hope all of you will be by the time you're ready to graduate, and he and I were working together as a team, that business of one partner directing general attention of everyone present to the other, could be very valuable. Stop and think about ways in which it could be used."

Bleys found himself intrigued. The directing of all the attention of the class upon him, this first time he was a part of it, had certainly been a good example of a point the instructor wanted to make. However, it was not lost upon him that so singling him out might have had another purpose as well. For one thing the question asked him—whether he had any comment—almost implied that he came to the class with something of a knowledge of what the instructor was talking about.

So his words had not only served the purpose of directing the attention upon Bleys, but establishing the fact that perhaps he might be differently equipped than the rest of them. The inevitable question which must occur to the minds of at least the brighter ones among the class must be—how much then did Bleys know that they did not?

It could be, for example, that the question, on Dahno's order, was designed to give Bleys a bit of a push toward an ultimate position of superiority over the rest of them.

"You're already familiar, from past classroom sessions," the instructor was going on, "with methods of both hypnosis and auto-hypnosis. Note that they all spring from capturing the attention of the one who is to be hypnotized, even when that one is yourself. That, of course, is only the first step. Then comes the focusing of attention. This becomes important when you're dealing with people whom you have not met before and whom you ultimately wish to persuade in some direction or another, possibly to get them to give you information that otherwise they might not give.

"Literally," he went on, "any method can be used to draw their attention. But note that it should be an attention that makes it pleasant to concentrate in that direction. You can certainly attract anyone's attention—man or woman—by saying something hostile or making a hostile move toward him or her. Or, simply by challenging them in some way." He paused for a moment, looking again at Bleys.

"However," he went on, "unless what you do leads to a desire on their part to pursue the matter from an interested viewpoint; and on the basis of regarding you in a friendly manner, even if they're not yet fully prepared to trust you, it's not the best method of making use of any kind of hypnotic reinforcement to what you want them to accept."

He lectured them on this subject for about another fifteen minutes and Bleys listened fascinated, hearing many of the things that he had picked up wordlessly from observing and imitating his mother, spelled out in words. Then the rest of the hour was given over to demonstrations and practice.

The instructor would call one of the class up on stage and quietly and privately explain a specific use of the hypnotic process in gaining information—all this out of hearing of the rest of the class.

He would then place an adhesive button behind the ear of the man to whom he had talked; and from offstage, through a hand-phone that hid his voice from everyone else, would coach him through the ear-button, step by step through an interview with another class member. One who had been given no instruction except to sit at a table and talk with the man being coached.

In this manner the instructor demonstrated three different patterns of putting the uncoached member of the class into what he called a "communicative" state. None of these, he emphasized, was fully hypnotic, but only a heightened willingness to talk. Basically, it came from his planting the feeling in the other person that the one he was talking to was someone who could be confided in and trusted.

This instructor was followed by a woman who coached the class in a number of small differences in manners on the planet to which their class of trainees would be going as successful graduates.

"—Bear in mind," she said, "the differences in manners, alone, isn't going to make any large difference in attitude. But if your manners, your way of eating, talking, standing and so forth match those of the one you're talking to, it'll unconsciously foster the feeling that you're one of their own kind, and bring the two of you closer. Also to a certain extent, the idea that anyone is dealing with a person from the same family, clan, or society, relaxes the conscience about sharing essentially private information."

She paused.

"Not in all cases," she went on, "but for those met on a casual basis this hinting at a common background is normally a plus."

Following the hour with this instructor, they broke for lunch. This was served buffet style with the trainees filling their plates and taking them to small tables that held two or three together—at most four. Bleys, looking around the room, spotted the man who had trained with him in judo the day before, and was a little surprised to see him with one arm in a sling.

Bleys moved forward quickly, since the one arm was making it difficult for James to handle his plate and pick up things near the end of the line, like dessert and silverware.

Bleys moved forward and, smiling at the other, lent a hand in supporting the plate while the final things were gathered. He had expected almost any kind of reaction, but was rather surprised at the warmth of the return smile James turned on him. Bleys, carrying both his plates and one of James', led the way to a small table that could hardly hold more than the two of them and was at present deserted.

"What happened to you?" he asked James in his most friendly voice, once they were settled on the table with the plates set out. "There was nothing wrong with that arm of yours the last I saw of you yesterday."

James smiled again, this time a little ruefully.

"Punishment for my sins," he said lightly—but the phrase had an underlying seriousness of tone that betrayed a Friendly background—"It's only a pulled muscle. 1 ought to be all right in a day or two, but I'm going to miss at least a couple of days' practice. When the class was breaking up yesterday, sensei suggested I stay behind and the two of us work out a little further, together. Then he showed me how unfair it is to take advantage of someone with less experience than you. He didn't say a word and at first I didn't know why he was handling me the way he did; but at the end, after my arm had been hurt and he was helping me dress, he mentioned that there 'are always manners within the dojo—if nowhere else.' I understood then. My apologies for what I did to you yesterday."

"They aren't necessary," said Bleys. Happily he was a quick thinker. This sudden development offered almost too many possibilities to consider at once. In the meantime he asked a question.

"You understood at once?" he said. "I don't follow that."

"Why, of course sensei saw what I did to you. He sees everything that happens in class—I should have thought of that," explained James, patiently. "I shouldn't have treated you that way, and he was pointing it out to me."

"You understood all that from a few words about manners?" Bleys persisted, still buying himself time in which to consider the situation. Looked at from all angles the whole affair did not seem something that could have been easily arranged by Dahno.

"Oh yes," said James, "but of course it wasn't just that he gave me a taste of the same sort of manners I used toward you. What he did and said had to do with something we all have to learn. There was also a hint, there that I might have damaged my chance to graduate by doing it. If he did not pass me on my work in the dojo, then the fact I'd passed everything else wouldn't help. I'd be left behind when the others shipped out."

"Graduating means that much to you, then?" said Bleys.

"Doesn't it to all of us?" James stared at him in something like astonishment; then the astonishment went. "Your brother hasn't told you?"

"My brother tells me almost nothing," said Bleys, "that's part of my training."

"Why," James said, "none of us would want to turn our backs on the chance to build the future for all worlds."

"Ah," said Bleys, noncommittally.

"Your brother hasn't explained all that?" said James. "Why, what else are we mixed-breeds for? If not to give the inhabited worlds the best the Splinter Cultures have produced in specific individuals; to give them a government influenced by the fittest. What else were the Splinter Cultures for in the first place, if not to develop the things every one of us in this class combines inside ourselves, depending upon our particular heritage?"

"Put that way it does seem inevitable," said Bleys.

There was implied flattery in this statement. James clearly accepted it. He leaned forward over the table, resting his injured arm upon it.

"You and I won't live to see the end results of our organization, of course," he said, "but that doesn't mean we can't help get things started. The credit goes to your brother, who had the genius and foresight to start us moving toward that end."

"Yes," said Bleys, "Dahno always was a leader."

"Yes," James' eyes almost glowed, "he's the one Other who's absolutely essential. The information we gather has to center someplace, because that information eventually has to give us the power to take the rest of the race over bloodlessly; and lead them eventually all up to our own level. Our work would go for nothing if it wasn't for Dahno."

"It's good to hear you say that," said Bleys. "As I say, you'd be surprised at what I don't know about my brother."

CHAPTER . 19

"But how does it happen that you know so little about your brother?" asked James.

"I've been with my mother all these years," answered Bleys. "My father was dead; and, as I say, my mother and I moved around a lot. We were on New Earth and Freiland and a couple of the other New Worlds and even on Old Earth itself for a while. I was on New Earth just before I came here. Neither my mother nor Dahno are great at keeping up a communication, so up until 1 came here to Association Dahno hadn't bulked very largely in my life."

"He's a remarkable man," said James. He went on to talk about Dahno at some length. But nothing he had to say provided Bleys with information of the importance of what Bleys had discovered in the first few words the other man had had to say.

After lunch they had a short hour more of classroom work, and then they moved into the gymnasium, for some more martial arts, men instruction by a swimming instructor.

As soon as Bleys was free he headed directly to the office. Once more Dahno was not there and he was free to work in what he now had dubbed in his mind the research room.

He went over some of the material he had read the day before, looking for new clues. What he found confirmed the rather astonishing thing he had learned from James. Dahno was deliberately enlisting mixed-breeds from the three main Splinter Cultures into an organization that was given the idea that it was to be the controlling influence on government for the New Worlds.

In the days that followed he continued his afternoon researches, and dug even deeper into the mass of available information. He discovered, however, very little beyond what he had found out from James originally. Whenever he got on an interesting track of developing information, it ended, blocked, up against the area Dahno had cued to be secret. Breaking the code that would let him into that secret part of this knowledge repository was beyond Bleys' ability. From what he now knew about his older brother, he doubted that anyone else besides Dahno had the ability to enter the secret area.

Nonetheless, by carefully applying what he had found out in the research room to the trainees themselves, and by gradually beginning to build a mental structure around what he did know, with what must be there to support it, Bleys finally got a picture of the organization. It was set up to be controlled by Dahno and spread out over at least eight of the New Worlds. It consisted, what with the recruits his trainees had brought into the organization, of something between ten and fifteen thousand people.

In theory, they were all Others, as Dahno had evidently named them. In actuality the only thing they had in common was a particular type of personality, very like that of the Friendlies, themselves, in mat they had a fixed picture of the universe and followed without question. At the same time, they were both hard-headed and persuasive. The sort of profile that would ideally fit a lobbyist.

Unfortunately, it was at this point that he appeared to be blocked. It was frustrating. Undoubtedly there was more to be got from the files that were open to him, if he had only more background of information to knit them together. What was needed, he saw clearly, was time. While he had already decided that the days measured by his lifetime were precious, now some must be given to more studying and gathering of information.

Above all, he needed more information from the other trainees. It occurred to him suddenly that there could be no better time than now for conversation with those other trainees whom he had already made into friends. Since it was a weekend; undoubtedly they would be free to do what they wanted, and there would be time for conversation.

He went to the trainees' apartment building.

It was no different there than always before, although another old man was acting as guard on the desk inside the front door. But when he rode up on one of the disks of the elevator to the floor which housed the trainees and let himself into their quarters, he was startled to find no one there at all.

He smiled at his own stupidity. Of course, after being penned up here all week, they would find places outside to go to. And it had never occurred to him to check with any of those he knew as to what sort of place, if any, they gathered in on these, their two days off. He left and returned thoughtfully to the apartment he snared with Dahno.

The apartment was empty. Dahno, of course, was not there. He made himself something to eat and drink and lay down on his bed. He could have studied or simply read; but just at the moment he did not feel like either.

Lying there, he found himself slipping back into his image of himself as if he stood alone out in space, light-years from the nearest inhabited worlds, solitary, forever set apart from other humans.

He would never have a friend, a friend on his own level. He' faced that fact squarely. That was the drawback to being what he was. The advantage was that from this lonely distance he could look and see the universe as a single and understandable whole.

He had half hoped that Dahno would turn out to be someone with whom he could feel a closeness. But it was clear to him now that Dahno had found fullness of occupation in what he was building; and what he was building was far too small for Bleys.

Dahno thought only of the present and his immediate lifetime. Bleys thought of all time in the future. The means to help the race he had envisioned were still hidden; and would only be revealed as he learned more about his fellow humans and the situation on all the worlds. There was no question of the goal. It was to produce a humanity equal to any future challenge. A race of people gifted as he, himself, was gifted. His problem would be to start them on the route that it was his duty to put them on. Otherwise—why had he been born?

He could not yet understand it all, nor would he be able to in his lifetime. But nonetheless he knew what it was. And he saw a possibility for himself as a tool for the human race. It could be the one thing he could do that would save the race.

They would not know, they would not understand, they would never be able to grasp what he had done. Possibly at some time in the far future, they would have grown to the point where they could look back and see that it was he who took them off the dangerous path he saw them now on, and put them on a proper way to an unlimited future.

But for now—it occurred to him—he must make the best possible use of things immediately at hand to be learned and mastered. That meant gathering the skills and information to make himself a leader, and to understand Dahno's full network, together with Dahno's control of the people who made it up.

He could begin immediately by improving his own learning process. His work with the trainees was useful up to a point. But the abilities of his mind galloped ahead of them. It struck him that his greatest need was to be charismatic. Where he could not gain acceptance as an equal, he could as the superior he had been bom to be. No more would he attempt to be accepted as one of them. Let them accept him as their director and commander.

It was so obvious he could not believe how simple and straightforward it would be. In every direction that involved book learning he was already far ahead of them all. Only in physical matters, like this study of judo, did he have to progress at a more normal pace—but even that normal pace could be improved as his understanding interpreted what he was told and fitted in into a whole pattern of action.

Meanwhile there were other things that he could be learning in the time he was now wasting in the classroom at the apartment building.

He must talk to Dahno about that.

He sat up on the edge of the bed and called Dahno's bed phone to leave a message on it.

I haven't seen you but I need to talk to you. Arrange your schedule so that we can get together for a short while at least. This is important.

Ironically, he was just completing this message when he heard the door of the apartment open.

He met his half-brother in the lounge; and Dahno smiled at him, but started to brush past him.

"I've got to dress for dinner," Dahno said. "How are things with you?"

"Things are such that I'm badly in need of a moment's talk with you," Bleys answered. Dahno kept going.

"Not now if you don't mind," his voice floated back, as he disappeared into his own bedroom. "I've got just enough time to get dressed and get down to the restaurant."

"You can be fifteen minutes late, I think," said Bleys. He had quite boldly followed Dahno into the bedroom. His half-brother turned around and stared at him.

"What's this?" he said. "I told you I barely had time enough to get ready. As for being late—"

"If you'd kept in closer touch with me, I wouldn't have to delay you now," said Bleys, "but time's being wasted."

"Yes indeed," answered Dahno, "my time."

"Ultimately yours, but right now mine," answered Bleys. "Unless you can spare me fifteen minutes of your time now,

I'll walk out of this apartment and out of your plans for the future. I don't know how much you've counted on me, but it ought to be worth fifteen minutes."

"You'd walk out?" said Dahno, half-smiling. "You'd starve."

Bleys thought gratefully of the interstellar credit paper still in the secret compartment of the belt around his waist.

"That was taken care of before I left mother."

"Oh? Indeed!" said Dahno. "All right, let's go back to the lounge and talk."

They did so and sat down in facing chairs.

"Well, what's on your mind?" said Dahno in a mild tone. There was no sign that he had been at all disturbed by Bleys' interruption of his plans.

"It's very simple," said Bleys. "Some things like the judo classes are useful. For the rest of it, though, I'm as out of place among those people as I would have been in the little schoolhouse in Henry's district. I'll still keep going and joining them and working until I get to know all of them well, and I'll still take advantage of things where I need partners to work out with. But aside from that there are a number of specialized things in which I'd like to have instruction. A lot of that can be done with tutors or specialists that can come to me here. Unless that's more than you can afford."

Dahno laughed.

"The funds come when they're needed," he said, "haven't I mentioned that to you before? The thing to do is to have power, which lies in influence. If you have that not only credit, but everything else follows automatically."

"And on that theory, the more capable I am, the more useful I am, and the more influence I should be able to gather. So the more of everything else should follow," said Bleys. "Am I right?"

Asking that question was almost more bold a thing than following Dahno into his bedroom and insisting on talking to him. Hidden in it—and Bleys knew Dahno would recognize the fact—was a requirement of Dahno to state what he considered Bleys was worth to him. If he was not in favor of hiring the special tutors and teachers and trainers that Bleys had in mind, then obviously the future he had in mind for Bleys was not one as lofty as he had always implied.

"That's a good point," said Dahno thoughtfully. "What do you think you might want?"

"I'd better make you a written list," answered Bleys. "It'll be quite a list, including special training with sensei, if that's possible; a speech therapist to give me a larger range of voice; and someone who teaches fencing to improve my balance. I also want a tutor to begin the study of phase-shift mechanics and phase physics. Then, as soon as I'm ready to go on to studying those two things, I'll want tutors in them too. There's at least a dozen other things. I'll make you a list, as I say."

"All right." Dahno smiled and got up. "I'm free to go dress then, Mr. Vice-Chairman?"

"Absolutely," said Bleys, "but you might keep it in mind that it would be a good thing if the two of us had time to talk with each other at least once a week."

"It won't always be possible," said Dahno, "but—I'll make it as possible as I can."

He went off to his bedroom. Bleys sat where he was, feeling the beginnings of a glow of satisfaction. He had not only gotten what he wanted, but he had plumbed the depths of Dahno's interest in him. Clearly, Dahno was willing to do a great deal rather than give him up. The reasons for that were something that Bleys would have to discover somewhere along the line. But for now, it was enough to realize that such an interest was there.

In the next week he discovered where at least a good share of the trainees were to be found on a weekend, as well as making several new friendships among his fellow trainees. He now was on good terms with close to a majority of the group; and he expected—and was later proved right—that after a certain number had been won over to him, the rest would come almost automatically.

Rather like Dahno's rule about influence leading to power and power leading to everything else.

At the same time, he was a little sadly amused at the way they responded to what were essentially Exotic techniques— the same Exotic techniques on which they were lectured weekly, and some of which had already been explained to them. Such a discovery no longer made Bleys contemptuous of his fellow human beings, it only saddened him with the reminder of his own difference from them.

The place to which most of them went for their weekends was a particular hotel in town. Not all chose to go there, and in fact, he learned from James, from time to time they would drift to different hotels; but this information was unimportant compared to the fact that he discovered something else very interesting indeed. That was, that there was also a class of women trainees, who were evidently sent through much the same classes but differently and apart from the men. Not all, of course, but a good share of the men and women came together in their free time at the currently-used hotel.

Bleys had already come to understand that he was attractive to women. But he was still young and therefore still, to a certain extent, self-conscious. He was slow about making friends with the women; and he tended to shy away from those who seemed in any way aggressive. This reaction in him cropped out unexpectedly, to the surprise of all the rest, but to himself as well, when one of the women with whom he had had little to do came up and sat down on the arm of his chair.

"Just look at that hair," she said, and ran her fingers through Bleys' dark brown, slightly wavy, hair.

"No more of that, if you don't mind," said Bleys, instinctively pulling his head away from her hand.

Not so much the words, but the tone in which he spoke turned the heads of all the others within hearing toward him. The woman who had been about to say something teasing about his self-consciousness, on second thought said nothing. She got up from the arm of his chair and walked away.

Bleys suddenly realized he had spoken in a voice that he did not know he possessed. But he recognized whose voice it was. It was the voice of Henry, who was used to making no statements that were not orders, amplified and made even more potent by Bleys' recent training. At base was the fact that

Henry had never emphasized what he had to say, nor identified it as a command. But the absolute certainty that it would be understood and obeyed had always been clearly- broadcast in the tone of it. As it had been just now—only more so—in Bleys' voice.

Unconsciously, Bleys had taken that tone and put it to use. A feeling of sudden guilt in him was overwhelmed by the feeling of surprise. He could hardly believe that an attitude of command had come to him that easily. With that understanding came another one, close on its heels: that it would be a mistake for him now to apologize, as he had just been about to do, to the woman who had run her fingers through his hair. At one stroke he had taken the attitude of someone to be obeyed by all the rest of them.

Immediately, he was concerned by the fact that by doing so, he might have made enemies of all of them, all over again. But; looking around at the faces around him, he did not see resentment on any of them. Just as he had assumed that they would do what he said, so they had assumed that he was in a position to tell them what to do.

It was a very large discovery indeed. He tucked it away in the back of his mind to be thought of when he had more time to himself.

In the weeks to come he tried to make some amends for any harshness the others might have felt in his words; and went so far as to make easy friendships with a number of the women. Affection he found. Love, he could not find; by consequence of the very fact he was committed to setting himself apart from all other humans.

So he could not talk to any of them about his plans for the future, his vision of a race purified and set right upon its way; and the result was to leave him feeling more isolated even than before.

Still, in other ways during the next weeks, months, and years, he made as much use of this situation as possible; gathering information almost as one might gather a bale of straw, a single straw at a time. Likewise, he did the same with the several new classes of trainees that succeeded his first one.

At the same time, his own private lessons were beginning to have their effect. The fencing instructor and the special sessions with the sensei developed him amazingly, not merely in the area of physical strength but also in the way in which he handled his body. Eventually, these instructors passed him on to those who could give him more advanced teaching in the same areas.

The same thing took place as well with most of those who came to give him special or private lessons. The speech therapist extended his vocal range a full octave and a half both upwards and downwards and a teacher of singing eventually brought his voice to a resonance that made the voice itself arresting; so that he discovered he could use the tone of it alone as a means of focusing the attention of someone on whom he wished to use his personal control of the Exotic techniques—in which he took further tutoring from a true expatriate Mar an Exotic.

In the process, he stumbled upon a discovery. He had always studied what he had to, before. In the beginning, that had been those fields of information handed him by the caretakers; then, here on Association, it had become what he felt he required to reach the goal he had set for himself.

But now, he was free to learn anything he liked. Dahno was as good as his word. Bleys could spend whatever he wished on teachers and materials. For the first time he began to poke his intellectual nose into geology, archaeology . . . and other systems; ending finally with the arts—painting, sculpture, music and writing.

It was with these last that he made a marvelous discovery. He had never encountered any human, even Dahno or his mother, who had the power to stretch his own understanding to -the limit. But in the arts, he found it—in the time-proven classics of brushwork, knife-work, and the mind-work that went into poetry and literature.

Why, he thought, here they are, the people I could talk to and befriends with.

What the makers had to say was to be found in the results of their efforts, in their carvings, their buildings, their words. No, he thought; it was not in these things, it was to be heard and understood through them. For that which came through, spoke to him as no human being ever had—on his own level of ability. It was as if a soundless chime was heard in his head whenever he encountered what was held in the living material of their work.

Sadly, those who had made these things might have proved as disappointing to him as all other humans—for he no longer believed that anywhere would he find his equal—but they had all possessed the capability of meeting him on a level in what they had created.

The result was that he pushed aside all the other attractive things that beckoned him after his important studies were found; and found himself losing himself in the culture of the total race, as exemplified by the best it had done for centuries.

He learned Classical Greek only to read the Iliad; but then he read it, and the original words rolled musically and thunderously in his mind. And the colors of the centuries stained him through.

He found himself thinking that, if only he did not have this higher, more important duty that held him in an unbreakable grip, he could live exclusively with these shining things; and maybe even try his hand at equaling some of them himself, forgetting all responsibilities to the civilized worlds and those who lived on them.

But the higher duty to move the race up—even one step—continued to hold him with a hand more powerful than the movement of the stars; and it was in the ordinary things and people such as the trainees themselves, that he finally learned what he needed to progress most surely to that end. Slowly, bit by bit from them, he picked up information with which he was able to build bridges of conjecture out over the void of that part of Dahno's organizational activities which Dahno had kept hidden from him.

Not one, but many such cantilevered bridges of logical theory, he built; until at last they all locked together and he became certain at last that he had a strong grasp on what he had set out to find.

It happened then, four years after his confrontation with Dahno over the special tutoring, that he was waiting in the lounge of the apartment late one afternoon when he knew Dahno was expected in.

When the door from the hall opened and Dahno finally entered^ Bleys stood up to meet him and they met almost in the center of the lounge.

They stood eye to eye now. Bleys at last had the same height as his brother; but he was still slim, for all the hardness of his trained body. He had no illusions about becoming particularly dangerous physically. It was only that he conceived the work he would have to do with his mind needed a physical vehicle in the best possible shape. He had made it that way, accordingly; and he would work to keep it that way.

"Something on your mind?" asked Dahno.

"Yes," said Bleys, "why don't we both sit down?"

By custom they took the two chairs in which they usually sat facing each other in this room. As usual Dahno dwarfed the extra large size of his; but Bleys no longer seemed lost in its equally large partner. He sat easily, with his back straight, barely touching the back of the chair.

"It occurred to me right now there's something you might want to think about," Bleys said. "Also, I've got a suggestion about myself."

"Charge ahead," said Dahno, throwing himself back in his chair.

"The something you might want to consider," said Bleys, "is I think you've got a potentially explosive situation with those private gunmen of yours, or whatever they are, and wherever you've got them hidden; together with this newest political project you're involved in."

He delivered the bombshell of his words quite calmly, and ended looking at Dahno, waiting for his answer.

Dahno slowly sat upright in his chair.

"How did you get into the secret files?" he asked. "Neither the Hounds nor the project are in the open ones."

Bleys waved a hand dismissingly.

"I haven't," he said. "I'm only judging from deductions

made, from all the other information I've gathered over the past four years. There have to be many things in your secret files I don't know. But I know the general shape of a great many other things that have to be there. I've worked out only what I can; but it adds up to a pretty clear general picture of what you haven't been telling me." -

He waited. Slowly a broad grin spread across Dahno's face.

"Well, well, Mr. Vice-Chairman," he said, "congratulations on your graduation. Those milk-teeth seem to be all gone finally; and I'd say that's a pretty serviceable set of tusks you've grown in their place."

CHAPTER 20

"I wouldn't call them tusks," said Bleys.

"I would," said Dahno, and there was no humor or mockery in his tone. "Knowledge is power, you know that as well as I do. Those are knowledge tusks."

"Whatever you want to call them," said Bleys, "they're at your service."

"Good," answered Dahno, "welcome to the firm, Mr. Number One Vice-Chairman. We'll put you to use. You'll begin by answering a question. Why do you think keeping Hounds is dangerous?"

"Because any loaded weapon in reach is always dangerous," said Bleys. "If it was an actual gun, and you couldn't lay hands on it at a moment's notice, you might end up thinking twice before using it. Otherwise, the time may come when you'll reach for it automatically—and later regret it." . "And you think that's a danger with me?" said Dahno- "Do you think with what I've done and what I am, I'd be the kind of person who'd go off half-cocked in a situation like that?"

"I think anybody would be in danger of going off half-cocked in a situation like that," said Bleys. "When you were young, did you ever use your strength to get what you wanted, without thinking out all the possible results and what might result from them?"

"Yes," said Dahno slowly. "But that was when I was young. I don't agree with you that the Hounds are any danger to anyone unless I want them to be. And I never intend to want them to be. They're there to be used as a threat, instead of as a weapon. Now, are you satisfied?"

"Yes, Mr. Chairman," said Bleys.

"Then that's settled," said Dahno. "Now, what do you know about this political project you referred to that I'm supposed to be involved in?"

"I only know there is one," said Bleys. "I'm fairly sure it has to do with all the talk I've heard about the building of another Core Tap to provide power to the planet. What I've had to do has been like figuring out the orbit of a star around some dark body, by the eccentricities of its orbit. I try to reason from result to facts. As a result, my facts are merely educated guesses. But I'll bet I'm right about the Core Tap."

"And why would you think I was involved with the decision in the Chamber whether or not to build it?" asked Dahno.

"Because it's such a huge, technical job to reach down into a world's hot core to generate power for the southwest of this continent. So, it's a question of spending so much credit that the very economic balance of the world will be affected," said Bleys. "The truth of the matter is, from what I'm able to judge of this planet, it can't afford that expense yet, badly as the energy from another Core Tap would be needed. Scientists would have to be hired from Newton, engineers from Cassida, and the cost of their salaries would be high, as well as the payments to the worlds they came from—all that in interstellar credit. Which must come hard to a world that is largely self-sufficient because it is so poor in materials it can export to gain that credit. About all Association, here, and Harmony, have to export is their young men as mercenary soldiers to the other worlds; and mercenary soldiers don't bring in a great deal of interstellar credit, except in quantity. At the same time, those young men are needed here."

"Right you are, in everything about the Core Tap," said Dahno, "but you didn't answer my question. Why would I be involved?"

"Simply because so many of your clients are representatives in the Chamber. Because they're involved, you'll get drawn into it. You could find yourself giving answers to opposite sides of the question."

"Good for you," said Dahno softly. "Suppose I say everything you tell me is true. Still, you tied that in with the question of the Hounds and my own personal safety. What I'm hearing is, I'll be involved too deeply for my own safety and the safety of our organization of Others. Be a little more specific, Mr. 'Vice-Chairman."

"Do I need to be?" said Bleys with a shrug. "Certainly the situation has to mean that kind of danger for you."

He paused, watching Dahno.

"Don't you think that could be part of my job?" Bleys went on. "Keeping my eyes on the general picture, while you're focusing on what specifically is to be done; and warning you if I think I see trouble?"

Dahno nodded slowly.

"Maybe that's a good suggestion," he said. "I have to keep my nose close to the grindstone, and it does limit my field of vision. Very good, Mr. Vice-Chairman. Your job can be to look around while I'm getting things done and make sure nothing creeps up on us from behind." ' Dahno got up on his feet.

"Tell you what I'll do," he said. "I came home to change clothes before going to my regular table, but in honor of the occasion we'll stay away from that restaurant completely. I'm still going to change clothes; but we'll go have a private meal, just as we used to when I was bringing you in from Henry's place in the country. But first I'll take you by the office and I'll give you your key to open the secret files."

He was as good as his word. They stopped at the office first and Bleys was given a key to the secret files. Bleys' mind itched to be at them—for what he had been able to guess about them was only a fraction of what he knew he could discover from an actual look at them. But Dahno was there with him.

"I'm flattered," he said to Dahno. "Very flattered."

"You should be," said Dahno; "no one else has ever unlocked those files; and until you came to Association, I never thought anybody but me ever would."

He turned away.

"Now, for dinner," he said, "I know the place we want."

The place was all that two people could want who wished to keep their conversation private. The tables were enclosed in little alcoves so designed that sound did not carry from them, even to the most nearby of other tables and alcoves. Over the wine, which Bleys passed up, and of which Dahno drank copiously, his half-brother told him more about himself than Bleys had ever expected to hear.

Like Bleys, he had at first attracted their mother's hopes. Here, she had thought—as she had with Bleys—was someone she could show off; and who, in return could show her off. For if the child was that bright, people must think, how bright then must the mother be?

Dahno however, unlike Bleys, had never opposed her openly. He had pretended to go along with her while stealing more and more time for himself and his own activities; until she discovered this and—since by this time he was at an unlovely age and now looked entirely too old to be the wonder-child that she had first envisioned and in fact used him as—she locked him up. He broke out and ran away, trading on the fact he was already almost adult size. She had him recaptured and sent him on to Henry. Once again, this had been with the complaisant aid of Henry's brother, Ezekiel.

At Henry's, Dahno had worked his persuasiveness upon Henry, until he had Henry in a position to agree to the fact that for all Dahno's muscle, his mind and skills could be more help to the farm by putting them to use in the city.

Dahno was allowed to go, accordingly. Once there, by using his own natural ability to ingratiate himself with people, plus the Exotic techniques he had, like Bleys, picked up from their mother, he had soon climbed to a position in which he could find backers to start him in the business he was in now. He had made this a quite straightforward business deal; and had paid back all those who had lent him the funds originally to set him up. He was, in effect, a lobbyist-at-large—and not even restricted to politics at that.

To the astonishment and pleasure of those who first consulted him, his area of knowledge took in the whole scope of the economic situation on Association, and Harmony as well. Since then it had grown to where he could also take into account the situations on the other planets, the rest of the Younger Worlds as well.

From that point on he had begun to build his organization of Others. As Bleys had already discovered, there had been for some years a loose social group of the mixed-breeds on this planet, drawn together by the fact that they were different.

At the same time Dahno had been careful to pick from among them those who were strongly schooled in the Friendly attitude of mind. He wanted believers, people he could bring to a fierce adherence to his own plans and pattern; and who would find that more attractive than anything else.

Also, he had held up the chance of attractive rewards for their working with him. Following their training, which was indeed good training, not just make-believe, they felt themselves stronger and more capable—and even in the process of their learning they began to appreciate what Dahno was doing for them.

All this, aside from the fact that they would be going off, some of them even to their native worlds or at least to one of the worlds from which their parentage was derived, to set themselves up with the sort of rewards and power that Dahno enjoyed himself.

Also, Dahno made sure that in his dealing with them, what he let them see of him reflected the fact that his lot was indeed attractive as well as powerful. He had always paid his debts to those he had borrowed from; and first of all to Henry. He still made frequent gifts of money to the farm as well as the little gifts he brought, occasionally, for the building of Henry's tractor. He even made visits just to visit.

"—And how about you," he asked, at last, across the table to Bleys, "how do you like it here in Ecumeny?"

Bleys was touched, not merely by Dahno's unveiling of his personal past, but by a genuine reaching out of warmth from him to Bleys. It was something Bleys reciprocated, now; but with reservations, because he was aware how his brother—like their mother—was capable of changing attitudes completely at different times and different places. Dahno, like her, had the knack of being in his own mind completely truthful at any moment, believing he meant entirely what he said. But at another moment, somewhat removed in time, he could feel equally truthful with an attitude that was the exact opposite.

Nonetheless, for the time of this one dinner they were closer, and felt that closeness, more than they had ever been before.

Seeing the chance to get back to more immediate matters, Bleys ventured to say something of what he had in mind for himself.

"It'll take me some time to study those secret files," he told Dahno, "but if the situation warrants it, and you still think it's a good idea, maybe it wouldn't be a bad notion on my part to travel around to all the worlds on which we've got established organizations. That way I could not only get a firsthand picture of our people already there, and the organization they've built, but some idea of how they're developing. Also, how close they're following your overall plans for the Others as a whole."

Dahno nodded slowly again.

"Good idea," he said. "I'm not great for interstellar travel myself. I've got my hands full; and anyway, I'd rather stay here and mind the store. But this way you can do the two things at once. I'd like to know if any of them are drifting out of the partern I tried to set them in, without having to take time off from things here, to find out."

Bleys found it interesting that his half-brother considered affairs on Association so demanding that he had been willing to risk the natural drift in attitude of those in his organization on other worlds. Dahno had to know, as well as Bleys did, what happens when people are removed from any outside source of attitude control. The next day Bleys opened up the secret files and went to work on them.

On the surface they did not seem to offer a great deal more than he had already guessed. The main difference was that in the secret files people were given names and assigned places. So that now he was able to get the list of the personnel in all of Dahno's organization.

Also there were details about Dahno's work with the people he advised; particularly those who were members of the Chamber.

Bleys was interested to note that his half-brother had been either consciously or unconsciously jockeying for a position of direct control over those within that Chamber from his beginning as an adviser. At the present time, on crucial legislation, the Five Sisters, whom he did not influence as a whole, had control; as long as they spoke and voted together.

The reason for this was that most of the church representatives in the Chamber were not necessarily the leaders of the church they represented. All five of the Sisters were charismatic. Eighty percent of the representatives were deputies appointed by leaders who felt it far more necessary to stay close to their flock, and give all their attention in that direction, than to sit off at a distance in the Chamber passing laws. Since the actual heads of churches tended to be charismatic, and then-deputies tended to be less so, the Five Sisters were natural leaders of the rest.

Bleys also looked for—and found—evidence of those in the Others' suborganizations on other planets being less successful, and drifting away from Dahno's original purposes. Of this, he found no direct evidence, but some very convincing indirect evidence; which he printed off, and at his next talk with Dahno passed the pages to him to read, without comment.

It was a few days later, and they were in Dahno's office, together, on a bright, rainless winter morning. Bleys sat quietly while Dahno scanned through the sheets. Since Bleys'

"graduation," he had given up most connections with the trainees, keeping only a few of his special tutors whom he considered necessary; and these were those training him in the physical area and on the subject of phase physics. The result was that he was free to meet with Dahno like this early in the day. Also, this was the best time for Dahno, when he was most free of people wishing to see him and ask his advice. The meetings had become a regular thing.

Dahno finished the sheets, put them down and looked at Bleys.

"You expected me to see what this indicates?" Dahno said.

"I knew you would," said Bleys. "And I thought it would be best you see the evidence first, without any comment from me."

"Right," said Dahno. "Quite right, Bleys. Have you got any comment now?"

"Why no," said Bleys, "I leave it up to you."

"I think we understand each other." Dahno smiled grimly. "It looks like your tour of our outworld organizations is overdue. It's high time you met our other groups."

He smiled again. But Bleys read anger behind the smile.

"Naturally, it'll officially be only a friendly get-acquainted tour; so you can get to know them and they, you."

"Of course," said Bleys.

"But it goes without saying," Dahno went on, "that if you find evidence of deviations, you'll let me know about it right away."

"I plan on sending letters by spaceship to you from each world, as often as ships from there leave for Association," said Bleys.

"Good," said Dahno. He slapped his enormous hand down on the stack of printout. "If changes are needed, make them—in my name."

"It might not be a bad idea," said Bleys, "if you gave me some sort of authorization to show them ..."

"Of course," said Dahno. "You can count on it. No reason for your not leaving on the first ship out, is there?"

"None. But I've a list of the order in which I'd like to visit

these worlds," said Bleys, "and it's not always the shortest way around. So I'll have to wait for the first vessel to Freiland. If you like, I can show you the list."

"Give me a copy of it," answered Dahno. He rose from behind his desk. "Well, I've got to get busy. I've appointments."

CHAPTER 21

"—Something to drink, sir?"

"No thank you." Bleys' low-pitched but resonant voice was polite but very definite. "Nothing at all. I've got a problem on my mind; and I'd appreciate not being disturbed."

"Of course, sir." The spaceship lounge attendant vanished.

Curiously, as in his last spaceship trip, years before, he was once more having to ward off lounge attendants; who offered to supply him with something to read, or something to drink or eat. Only now, it was for a different reason. It was not because one of them had felt a touch of pity for what she considered a lonely, inwardly lost, boy. Now, it was because of something that he almost radiated.

It was the effect for which he had used his life so far to prepare himself. Tall, now—far beyond the ordinary— handsome, straight, athletic and unforgettable, with his memorable voice and dark brown eyes that seemed to look deeply into people even when he gave them a casual glance, he was not easily ignored.

He was now someone whose attention people, including cabin attendants, instinctively found themselves wishing to draw upon themselves, in hopes he might find something in them as interesting as they found in him. It was an effect he had on everyone he met nowadays. He was conscious of it, but his realization of the full impact of it on other humans was yet to come.

In any case, the total effect was to cause him to be disturbed by attention he did not want. Courteously but firmly, he dismissed them; and, eventually, regretfully, they left him alone.

He needed privacy to contemplate this moment. For the first time in his life he was free to set about breaking loose on the path he had chosen. And there was something about gazing at the starscape from here in the spaceship, separate and solitary in its path through space, that reminded him of his own, familiar image of himself as someone isolated and alone, that made him able to look more clearly at the whole panorama of the race. Not merely at the point of time in which it lived now, but at its record up to this moment. All his study of art and history spread that record out before his mind's eye.

Against that panorama he saw the way he had picked out for himself more clearly.

It was now plain to him, the work that had laid itself upon him, to save humanity. It was something no one else had recognized, or there would have been mention of it and voices raised on its behalf before this. Over the years with Dahno he had come to see it with a clarity he could never have imagined earlier.

The duty was undeniable, correct, complete—part of the great evolutionary imperative he had found on Association. Humanity must obey it or dwindle and perish. Basically, the cause of all the race's troubles was the fact it had left the world of its origin before it was ready to do so. Now, it must go back, to start again.

What he foresaw he must do to-make it return would mean doing many things personally repugnant to him. But that was the price. For the first time he felt the sort of peace and certainty that Henry MacLean had found in his smaller way. To Henry, God was the answer to all things.

But Bleys knew there was no God—except for the one that the human race had invented to fill the great hunger in them all for guidance. There were only the inexorable workings of a universe too big to be grasped just yet in its entirety. Even by him. But he could feel a corner of its completeness, the working of its inexorable laws.

It would be his job to do the God-work, bring the race back into synchrony with those laws, working inside them—instead of against them, as a human race drunk on technology had done, these past three hundred years. To correct that would require his gaining more power, and a far greater use of it, than Dahno had ever dreamed.

He smiled, a little sadly, at the stars. The race would not thank him for what he must do to it. They might well curse him . . . some of them now, all of them later. But finally they would come over generations to understand the benefit of what he had done.

There was no pride for him to feel, no credit, no feeling of personal reward as a result of the eventual success of what he would do. He had not invented, created, designed or plotted this task—he had only recognized it and submitted himself to the work. As many of the God-believers would say, he had been "called" to it. But not by any deity. By the necessity of the evolutionary imperative that required humanity to progress in accordance with the universe's laws, or be discarded.

Nor would it be important that others understand what he and they must do. It was only important that they, like him, submit to it.

He must not expect understanding—not even from Dahno. Had others understood, they might have tried to do before this what he would do now. But they had been blind and therefore could not be blamed for not understanding. He, who was gifted with the ability to see, must therefore turn and embrace the isolation that, as a child, he had hoped to escape from. Embrace it as his birthright.

But first, the power. One step at a time; and the first step

was toward the beginning of his control of Dahno's organization of the Others. That done, he could move further to make the Others much greater as an instrument; and eventually, with them for leverage, gain control of all the worlds—even Old Earth.

He drifted into musing about what he must do on Freiland, first. Freiland—the oldest of Dahno's other-world organizations of the Others. The Vice-Chairman in charge there was Hammer Martin; and his file in Dahno's office had said he had all three—Dorsai, Exotic and Friendly—in his ancestry. But he had been raised a militant Friendly before he had broken with his family in his early twenties. The Vice-Chairmen in charge of the sub-organizations were all ambitious or they would not have competed with the other trainees of their class to graduate first and lead part of the organization.

It seemed to Bleys that the combination of Friendly roots and ambition suggested a way to handle Hammer.

Chapter 22

"You're the first Dahno's ever sent out with a team to expand the organization to other worlds," Bleys said to Hammer Martin over the main course of their evening meal, that first day on Freiland. It was a simple enough statement, but the richness of Bleys' voice and the warmth in his steady brown gaze upon Hammer's own washed-out blue eyes, implied a strong compliment.

The restaurant that Hammer had taken Bleys to had a different decor than that of Dahno's favorite restaurant back on Association. It was somewhat more luxurious, but also more designed so that people there could view clearly more of the other tables with their occupants. It was plainly a place to see and be seen.

"Yes, I've always appreciated that," said Hammer. Like Bleys he was not taking wine, or any other type of drink or relaxant with his meal. So much of his Friendly sternness still showed. "It was a great opportunity for me; and I've tried to make the most of it. I flatter myself I have. The secret is subtlety, always subtlety, never force."

Bleys recognized the last sentence as part of the graduation speech that he had heard Dahno give three classes of trainees now. Hammer enunciated the words as if he had originated them; and—thought Bleys—at least in the surface of Hammer's mind, he probably felt he had.

"The situation's different here, of course, than on Association," Hammer went on, "it's bound to be in a more free society. So I've found even more scope for getting things done here on Freiland."

"I'm sure," murmured Bleys, "I'm looking forward to you showing me what you do; and how you make the differences work."

"You've got my time completely—well, almost completely," said Hammer, "until you leave. It'll be two weeks, you said?"

"Two weeks before I can get a ship direct to Cassida and Newton."

"While you're close here," said Hammer, "I'm a little puzzled you don't stop at New Earth first."

"I'll be stopping on my way back, first to Harmony and then Association," said Bleys, lightly. "The itinerary works out more conveniently that way. By the way, you were saying something about having to make adjustments in the local organization, because of the difference between Freiland and Association."

"Small adjustments. Small adjustments only," said Hammer. He had taken advantage of Bleys speaking to eat some of his entree and he had to hurry to get it swallowed and speak. "I'll be showing them all to you. Be sure to look them over and report to Dahno. If he disapproves of any of them—"

Hammer let the sentence hang in mid-air. Clearly he did not expect Dahno to disapprove. With part of his mind Bleys was considering the irony of this thin, hatchet-faced man with all the visible appearance of a Friendly, sounding and acting like a smooth-tongued Exotic.

"You saw the office today," went on Hammer, "nothing new there, of course. I'll show you the group of trainees we're working with right now tomorrow."

"There's still the file room at your office," demurred Bleys. "I'd like to go through the files there."

"Oh? Of course." Hammer waved a dismissing hand in a very non-Friendly gesture. "It's the same old information, most of which has been shipped on to your Association office in any case. But if you'd like to."

"I would, indeed," said Bleys courteously. "It's a matter of being able to go back to my brother and tell him I've covered everything."

"Of course." Hammer nodded.

"That ought to take me the next few days, even if I start early and work late. I might even drop over tonight and start looking at the files," said Bleys. The first thing he had done with the authority of Dahno's authorization was to get copies of all keys that Hammer said were connected with the organization and its activities. "I suppose you've early appointments in the morning, so I won't expect to see you until about midday, if then."

"Well," there was a note of relief in Hammer's voice, "if you don't mind, the schedule is pretty busy, just now. Freiland's a very open planet, as you know. That means that business interests are scattered all over, and there's a couple of out-of-town visits I should make in the next day or two. They could be put off, of course, but it'd be better if I didn't have to—"

"You won't have to," said Bleys. He smiled at the other man. "We'll make this visit of mine as pleasant and easy as possible."

Bleys could have gone directly from parting with Hammer after the meal to the man's office. He was not tired. But instead he chose to return to his hotel suite, to let the information, and what he had observed in Hammer, soak a little in his mind. Many things benefited by being put aside that way for a short while, to see if they did not then produce further information.

In the case of Hammer, Bleys was already certain that he might uncover something that would be both interesting and something Dahno might take strong objection to. He was also fairly sure that Hammer was making, or already had made, efforts to hide any such thing from him. But circumstantial evidence, in the form of implications and conclusions drawn from what the regular open files could tell him, would either back up or destroy that notion.

After all, the man was still seven-tenths a Friendly. What Bleys felt suspicious in him might be simply the result of his own unexpected appearance—a brother of Dahno's, whom Hammer had scarcely known existed. Particularly, a brother with such a sweeping letter of authority.

After a time of lying on his bed and thinking, a thought occurred to Bleys. He had visited Freiland, but only when very young, with his mother. It might be important to taste the flavor of the society from an adult point of view. He knew its history. Its first settlers had been some very rigid-minded groups from western and northern Europe. These, however, had not taken full advantage of the fact that the planet was self-sufficient in metals and power sources—there was no need for a Core Tap, anywhere on Freiland, for example. Its land masses had a sufficiency of mountains offering power sources in the form of water and sun-power collectors placed in the proper positions on them.

He got up and went downstairs to wander first through the bars and dining areas of the hotel, and then out into the immediate area of the city around the hotel to observe what else he could of the populace.

The natives he saw did not show anything like the self-discipline that was supposed to be the hallmark of the Dorsai, nor the inner calm and assurance of those from the Exotic worlds. Generally speaking, they were smaller, noisier and apparently less disciplined—in their hours of relaxation, at least.

He saw a great many more individuals either drunk or partially drunk than he had remembered seeing, even as a boy on New Earth and some of the other worlds. There was almost something of the frontier-town-grown-up about the Freiland city scene at night.

If this looseness and freedom were reflected in their politics, he would expect a lot more overt illegalities among the governing members of its three houses, though only one of those was a real power when it came to enacting laws and governing the country.

The other two represented established interests and—on paper at least—had little or no power. It had been interesting for him to note that business groups, as well as population sections, elected representatives to that one powerful governing body.

Bleys was at Hammer's office before dawn. It had been interesting to him when he had first seen it yesterday to notice that it was laid out and set up exactly the same as Dahno's. Even the desks for the two employees were in the same position in the same-shaped room; and the file and research room had a similar hidden door off Hammer's personal office, which opened to a touch of one of his keys.

He began his search through the files.

His study of Dahno's files had developed in him a quick ability to assess the value of a file he looked at. He went through them rapidly; and the greater majority of them were just as Hammer had implied—completely harmless and uninteresting.

But there were others that implied something else. What Bleys was looking for were patterns of organization or reportage which indicated things hidden. No human could do anything, day after day, without falling into habits that showed themselves in patterns in the way he or she did it. If part of that pattern was designed to hide something that the person writing the file did not want suspected, then comparison of enough files could find it cropping up often enough to waken suspicion.

There was nothing complicated about the process. Only, it required somebody with Bleys' ability to scan the files at remarkable speed, to identify the suspicious patterns and keep them in mind; ready to be triggered if a similar pattern showed up. When enough patterns had been gathered, it was then merely a matter of ordering the research machines to gather samples of the patterns, put them together and print them out.

Once with enough patterns in his hand, and remembering their context, it was possible for him to begin making conjectures about what Hammer was attempting to hide. The more Bleys deduced, the more he knew what to look for in the way of other patterns; and the closer he came to what the other man had tried to conceal.

Still, capable as Bleys was, it took him a day and a half to gather any solid picture of what might have been obscured by these apparently complete, open files; and it was a long day and a half after that, before he was ready to talk to Hammer about it.

He chose to bring up the subject once more when the two of them were having dinner, after a certain amount of food and casual conversation had relaxed the other man. Then, with the main course dishes ready to be cleared away he reached into his pocket inside his jacket and brought out a paper which he handed to Hammer.

"I've seen that," said Hammer with a smile, "you showed it to me as soon as you landed."

"Yes," said Bleys quietly, but with his eyes very steadily on Hammer's eyes, "and you've obeyed it to the letter, haven't you?"

Hammer looked back at him puzzled, and as the silence continued and Bleys continued to hold his gaze, the smile slowly faded from the other man's face.

"I don't understand," Hammer said, "what are you getting at?"

Bleys took the letter back, rolled it up and put it inside his jacket pocket again.

"I'd hate to take that response of yours just now back to Dahno," he said.

For the first time, Bleys began to read minute, but undeniable, instinctive signals of alarm in Hammer. The general light of the restaurant reflected a little more brightly from his forehead, indicating moisture on the skin. His breathing accelerated—slightly but unmistakably—and his hands closed about items of tableware. One picked up a fork, the other clasped the stem of his water glass.

"I still don't understand," said Hammer, and his voice was beautifully controlled.

"All right, then," said Bleys, "we'll say no more about it."

"Good!" Relief was in Hammer's voice.

"Of course you know," said Bleys, "that I will have to tell Dahno when I get back to Association?"

"Whatever you think is right," said Hammer, tightly. He was no longer smiling.

"You see," said Bleys, quietly, "we've found that certain things are necessary in situations and organizations; or as part of an organization operating by itself; and one of those is that the person in charge necessarily has some things which must be kept secret—from everybody. On the other hand, very often they're things that he can't merely trust to memory. So, as a result, inevitably, there are secret files."

"I don't," said Hammer, "have any secret files."

"I think we should talk about them, anyway," protested Bleys, still mildly. "You see, one of the things that brings about a secret file is that anyone at all, in control or not, necessarily has a private life as well as an organizational one, and again it's inevitable that things from the private life will splash over and affect the organizational life. This is the sort of thing that needs to be kept secret. As I say, it always happens."

"You can tell Dahno," said Hammer between his teeth, "that this is one place where that rule's broken down. I never have had any need to keep anything secret from the organization; and I haven't. I repeat, there's nothing in the way of secret files here on Freiland."

"Good. I'll tell him exactly that," said Bleys. "Now, why don't we get off the subject? I'm sorry I had to bring it up in the first place; but you understand that it's something that is going to have to be asked at every stop I make?"

Hammer's tight jaw muscles stayed tense.

"Yes . . . ," he said, grudgingly moving toward a tone of better humor, "I can see that. Just as long as you make it perfectly clear to Dahno that there's nothing like that here."

"You can trust me," said Bleys, smiling at him. "I'll be bringing him the exact facts on every Others' out-world organization we have."

With that apparently touchy subject behind them, both men made an apparent effort to smooth over the emotions it had aroused, and find more interesting and pleasant topics for conversation.

Hammer began to give Bleys a description of the various teachers and trainers he was using for his trainees, and how he intended to use the trainee class once they graduated—since those trainees that the out-world organizations produced were for their own use. The aim was eventually to have an effectively-trained person at every point where highly valuable information could be garnered.

Such talk took up most of the dinner, and after that Bleys made his excuses, although Hammer hinted that he might like to look at the recreational elements of night-life on Freiland. He was, Bleys said, a little more tired out from the trip here than he had thought. The first two days' excitement had carried him through, but now it was catching up with him. When this sort of thing happened, he told Hammer, he had a tendency to sleep straight through for ten or twelve hours.

Accordingly, with dinner finished, they parted and Bleys went upstairs to his suite in the hotel.

He sat down at the writing desk in the lounge of his suite and added to the log he carried the events of the day just past, including a verbatim account of his conversation about the secret files with Hammer.

This daily duty done, he put the log away in its carrying case in his suitcase and stepped out for a moment onto the balcony of his suite, that opened off both the living room and the bedroom.

He was on the thirty-fifth floor of a forty-two-story hotel, and the city sparkled with lights at his feet as far as he could see. He did note that, possibly something like a dozen blocks away, the dark spire of an office building rose directly in line with his hotel, such that someone with a window or a balcony like this one could look directly in the direction of his room.

It would do no good, of course, to run a picture recorder from the vantage point of a floor in the other building that was on a level with his own. The flimsiest of inner drapes would be like an opaque wall to such a camera, at such a distance. But a sound-pickup gun could easily catch the slightest noise he made during the night. Of course, if he slept clear through, as he had told Hammer he might, the listening would be rather uninteresting.

It was a relief to feel safe about a long-distance camera, at least, being focused on his two rooms to see everything that might happen there.

Bleys normally locked such balcony doors as a matter of course. But tonight, when he went into the bedroom to get ready for bed, he opened wide one of the two french doors to the balcony, locked the other, and merely pulled the inner, net drapes. Then he took off his shoes and put on a robe, tying the cord at the waist. He lay down on the bed on his back, turned the light out and clasped his hands behind his head.

He lay, staring at the dark ceiling overhead in the room, that was just barely lighted by the glow of the city lights outside—so that it was a place of darkness to anyone whose eyes were not adjusted to it, but dimly visible to Bleys as his eyes adjusted to the gloom.

Shortly after midnight, two dark human bodies descended silently onto his balcony. They could only have come here by being lowered from the roof. Bleys, as silently, rose from his bed and moved over to a corner of the room where the wall met the glass that fronted on the balcony. He untied the cord which belted his robe and held it loosely in both his hands, before him. In slightly deeper shadow of the corner, he waited.

Cautiously the two intruders peered through the open door of the french window. With the outside light still enlarging their pupils, they would not be able to see from out there whether there was a body in the bed or not.

After a moment, they tried the one french door that was closed. Finding it locked, they entered in single file through the other door, pushing silently through the parting in the gauze curtains behind the open doorway and into the room. They were both carrying handguns that Bleys recognized, by their long barrels, grotesquely bulging toward the end from the wire shielding wrapped around them, as void pistols.

Assassins' weapons. The military had no use for them, because of their extremely short range and doubtful accuracy at more than ten meters. But they were absolutely silent, and they left no mark whatsoever upon the body they struck with their pulses of energy. Only the electrical activity in that part of the body that was touched, was canceled out for several minutes. A heart shot meant instant death, which could not be distinguished from simple heart failure, even in this day and age.

As the second one stepped clear of the doorway, Bleys moved into position behind him, the cord in both hands, held a little apart, so that a section of it draped between the two hands.

He threw the cord over the head of the second man and pulled it tight with a jerk around his neck, snapping it tight with all the strength of the arm muscles he had developed over the past five years. The man froze for a second, then dropped as shock and the cutoff of fresh blood to his brain hit him at the same time.

Bleys broke the fall of his body with an encircling left arm and with his right arm scooped up the void pistol that was starting to drop from the man's hand. The assassin hit the floor; and the one in front of him, alerted by the small noise, spun around to find, several inches before his nose, his partner's void gun aimed directly at him.

"Drop the pistol!"

It was Bleys' voice, with all the strength and resonance built into it during the last years of lessons, together with the note of absolute command he had learned from Henry.

"Back off to the foot of the bed."

The second assassin did so. Keeping the first weapon trained on him Bleys stooped briefly to scoop up the one that had just been dropped. He stepped wide of the bed, still keeping both the conscious and the unconscious man covered with the weapons.

"Pull your friend to the foot of the bed. Then lie down beside him—both of you on your stomachs. And stay there. I'll have a pistol on you all the time." He obeyed.

Bleys walked around to the head of the bed, snapped on the lights, and switched on the bedside hotel phone.

With one finger he coded in Hammer's private night-time number. Wherever the other man would be, the call would be automatically relayed from this phone to him.

The call was slow enough in being answered to indicate a reluctance to answer it. Finally, however, Hammer's voice came on, thickened as if he had just been roused from sleep.

"What is it?" his voice said.

"Who is it—I think you mean," said Bleys. "This is Bleys. I've run into a rather troublesome little situation here. I'd like you to come over to my hotel suite immediately."

There was a second of unintelligible mutter at the other end and then Hammer's voice came through, still thick with sleep but clear enough.

"I'm sorry, I can't come now, Bleys," he said. "I'll see you in the morning—"

"Hammer," interrupted Bleys softly, "do you remember the signed paper that was the first thing I showed you when I met you at the spaceport terminal here?"

There was a pause. Then Hammer's voice came, no longer thick with sleep, but angry.

"I remember it!"

"Then you can come over right away. Good," said Bleys, "how soon can you get here?"

"It's not easy," growled Hammer, "I'm in bed. The best I could do would be half an hour."

"Half an hour?" said Bleys. "I don't think—" He broke off to turn his head from the phone to speak to the one would-be assassin who had been choked unconscious and had come to and was instinctively beginning to try to get to his feet.

"Stay down there!" said Bleys, but without undue emphasis, knowing his voice would also carry over the phone. "I'm afraid I can't wait half an hour, Hammer. Twenty minutes."

He broke the connection.

"Did you hear that, both of you?" he asked, stepping to the foot of the bed to stand over the two on the floor there. "You'll have to stay where you are for another twenty minutes. Just relax. If either of you tries to get up, he'll be shot."

The two neither moved nor spoke.

It was a little more than twenty minutes, but only by a minute or two, before the doorbell to Bleys' suite rang. He depressed the button that allowed him to speak to whoever was on the outside.

"Who is it?"

"You know—Hammer!"

Bleys triggered the bedside control stud that unlocked the door. He heard Hammer enter and the door close behind him; and a moment later the other had come through the entrance from the lounge to the bedroom. He stopped abruptly at the sight of the two young men on the floor and the void pistol in each of Bleys' hands.

"You know these two, of course," Bleys said.

"I? I never saw them before in my life!" said Hammer. He smiled. "You seem to be getting all sorts of strange notions tonight, Bleys."

"All right, you two on the floor," said Bleys, "you've heard his voice, now you can lift your head from the floor for a moment long enough to look at him. Go ahead."

They lifted their heads briefly and put them down again.

"You know him, of course," Bleys said.

Both of those on the floor muttered negatives.

"And you're sure you don't know them, Hammer?" said Bleys. "That's a pity. I thought this whole business could be taken care of quietly and easily. It looks like I'll have to kill them; and then you'll have to take care of disposing of their bodies; and then see to it that I'm not bothered by the police or hear any more of this . . . though I might be discharged by court, anyway," Bleys went on thoughtfully; "they're obviously intruders. They made a point of dressing up all in close-fitting black suits. And planetary customs didn't find any void pistols in my baggage when I landed. Yes, I might just get off at that but—"

He smiled at Hammer.

"—I'd rather have you take care of it."

"What do you think I can do if you kill them?" Hammer demanded. "What makes you think I can keep the law off you?"

"You don't think you can?" said Bleys. "Well, that's interesting. You're the first of the Others' world organizations to be set up outside of Association. You're the oldest group in terms of being in place the longest. You mean to tell me that after all this time here, you don't have the kind of influence to take care of something like this, even if it does get to be a matter of police and courts? I don't really believe you, you know. I think you're just being modest. I know Dahno would be very surprised to hear that you didn't have that kind of influence. In fact I'm sure you could take care of this if I killed them. I just thought it would be less trouble for you if I didn't have to kill them. You see, I was sure you knew them. Are you absolutely positive you don't?"

There was a long pause, while Bleys' gaze moved back and forth from the two on the floor to Hammer and back to the two again—and then back to Hammer.

"All right, I know them!" said Hammer. "They're mine, the clumsy idiots!"

"Now it's them you're being hard on," said Bleys. "I'm sure somewhere along the line the members of your class were told that it's the one in charge who's always the one responsible. If they were clumsy, you were responsible. Now, how about disposing of them?"

"Let them go—" said Hammer.

"In your custody, certainly," said Bleys. He spoke to the two on the floor. "You can get up now and go with this man here, or do what he tells you."

Bleys kept the pistols trained on them while they got to their feet, looked at him, looked at Hammer, and stood undecided.

"There'll be a rope or something outside," Hammer told them. "Get out there, have whoever's on the roof pull you back up again; and the two of you try to get out of here without leaving any sign of having been here—if you can!"

Somewhat sullenly, they left. They were both remarkably alike, except for a slight difference in hair color; so that if the hair had only matched they could have passed for twins in their black suits. They left without looking further at either Hammer or Bleys; simply turned around and went back out through the opening in the curtain onto the balcony.

Bleys waited until he heard the sound of what was apparently a piece of scaffolding being pulled back up toward the floors overhead. Then he put down one of the void pistols, reached out to the controls by his bed and turned on all the balcony lights. Meanwhile, the void pistol in his other hand casually pointed more or less in Hammer's direction.

Outside the lights sprang on; and showed the balcony empty.

"Now you see why I said a little earlier this evening that under certain conditions certain things are inevitable. Weren't there some secret files you were going to show me?"

"You'll see them tomorrow," said Hammer.

"And you know what?" Bleys said. "By tomorrow when I see them, they might just be a little bit different. Strange how that can happen to files sometimes. But certain things will go missing and other things will be altered so that their meaning is different. Suppose we go look at them now."

"Now?" said Hammer. "It's the middle of the night—or later!"

"That's quite all right," said Bleys, "I'm not the least tired."

CHAPTER . 23

Hammer's outer office had the same garish appearance such offices always do at such a time of night, under such conditions. The seemingly too-bright lights, the naked surface of the night-clean desks, seemed to reject any daytime sense of life about the place.

Even Hammer's inner office, with its carpeted floor and paneled walls, had something of the same look about it. As they were about to go through the door into the file room Bleys placed a friendly hand on the shorter man's shoulder, feeling the muscles under the jacket tense at his touch.

Friendlies as an ordinary rule were careful to avoid physical contact; and enough of Hammer's raising had stayed with him to make him still that way. Bleys spoke to him in a soothing, friendly tone.

"Now," he said, "you know, and I don't, how much reading there is to do in these files I'm about to look at. I'll want you in the file room with me while I'm going through them. So why don't you bring a chair in if you think you'll need it?"

"No thanks," said Hammer tightly, "I'll sit in the desk chair there."

"I may want to use that myself," said Bleys. "In fact, I'll probably be viewing the files on the desk screen."

Without a further word Hammer picked up one of the slimmer floats in his office and carried it through the relatively narrow door of the file room to set it down at the room's far end.

He took his seat in it, crossed his legs, sat with his arms on the armrests of the float and stared at Bleys.

"How do I get into these files?" Bleys asked.

Hammer reached in a pocket and tossed him a key ring.

"It's the number seven key, there," said Hammer, "I mean, the one marked with the number seven."

Bleys used the key in the slot of the desk control pad, and saw the screen light up with, in large letters, the word personal. He tossed the keys back to Hammer and seated himself before the screen.

He began to summon up the files in alphabetical order, scanning them briefly, and moving on.

"Are you actually reading those?" asked Hammer after a few minutes.

"Yes," said Bleys, without looking up from the screen, "I'm a fast reader."

He continued through the files. It took him a little over an hour and a half to read them all completely. Then he shut off the screen and swung his desk chair around to face Hammer.

"Very interesting," he said to the other man. "Now, suppose you take me someplace quiet where we can talk—we can even go back to my suite, if you think it's safe. But I imagine it's bugged, isn't it?"

"It was," said Hammer briefly; "as you know, hotels sweep the rooms in suites for listening devices daily. We hadn't had time to set in a new microphone yet. But I can take you to a private club, where we ought to be free from interruption at this time of night, and as comfortable as you like."

"Good," said Bleys.

The private club, it seemed, was only a few minutes' drive away. Hammer unlocked its front door with another of the keys on his key ring and stepped inside. A man almost as large as Bleys, and a good deal heavier, rose from a chair behind a small desk and stepped in their way.

"Is this gentleman a guest of yours, Hammer Martin?" he asked.

"Of course," said Hammer.

"One minute," said the man. He stepped back to his desk, sat down and wrote on the window of a small, discreet badge, "Guest of Hammer Martin." He stood up, stepped back around to Bleys and pressed the badge against the lapel of Bleys' jacket. It adhered. He went back to his seat; and Hammer led Bleys on into what seemed to be a very large lounge, completely empty except for overstuffed float-armchairs, with a little wing table attached to one padded arm of each, holding a control pad and space for a drink or a plate.

"Wherever you like," said Hammer, waving at the empty room.

Bleys led the way over to a couple of chairs seated around a small round table in a corner.

"I actually don't have to ask you if this is bugged," he said to Hammer as they sat down, "because it'd be more to your disadvantage than mine to have what's said here overheard."

"It's not bugged," Hammer retorted.

Bleys leaned toward him, smiling engagingly. With voice and body he was able to command attention and sometimes automatically produce compliance, from someone who did not even know him. But he did not have Dahno's almost magical talent for making firm, warm friendships at what seemed hardly a glance and a word.

As a result, Bleys had concluded that he never would be able to match Dahno in this. The reason for Dahno's success was that with him, as with their mother, at any given moment everything he did and said was honest and true. He believed utterly in each word he spoke, as he spoke it. Bleys, who had come to see the universe in absolute and inflexible terms, could not hoodwink himself that way—blowing true one moment and false the next.

Here, however, was where the charisma he had worked to develop would pay off, if at all. With voice and eyes compelling, now, with his body leaning slightly, confidentially forward in the chair, and with a smile on his face, he spoke to Hammer.

"I wouldn't say there's anything in those files of yours that's beyond mending," he said in a warm, friendly voice, low-toned enough to be confidential.

Hammer said nothing.

"You've set up your own private corps of assassins," Bleys continued, in the same gentle voice. "That's not permissible. You've been taking personal payments, bribes and kickbacks, in addition to contributions to the organizational fund. That, you know, is also not permissible."

He paused, letting his words sink into the other man. Then he smiled. "On the other hand, anyone in charge of one of our organizations needs his own discretionary fund, and is allowed to set one up—with due understanding that it doesn't reach an unreasonable size—from the income that comes the way of the organization in the ordinary way of business. Only records have to be kept. Third, you've got a number of contacts here in important posts, governmental, military, legal and business, that aren't mentioned in your regular files. These are perhaps the most serious faults, of the ones I've mentioned so far. There are a few other smaller ones—call them peccadilloes—"

"Let's not waste time rehearsing what we both know you just read," said Hammer. "What do you want?"

"That's something we'll talk about in a moment," said Bleys, "and it's not something I want as much as something I can offer you. I'd make the same offer to anyone in your shoes right now."

He paused, to let this register on the other.

"As far as my listing your errors," he went on, "that was mainly to give you some evidence I actually did read through those files closely. Well now, you asked me. what I want. Actually, that isn't the question you ought to be asking, in any case."

"No?" said Hammer. "What question should I be asking?"

"How can the two of us put things properly on their way here?" said Bleys. "You see, your organization is part of our total organization. It follows that anything you do affects the whole of our Others group. Just to clear our decks, have you anything at all to say as justification for these things?"

"Certainly," said Hammer. "Dahno is nearly superhuman. We all know that. You seem to have a great deal of capacity yourself. But the point is, something could happen to Dahno. Something could break the structure of the total organization you talk about, so that each group like mine, on its world, is alone. If that happens, things should be set up so that it can survive by itself."

"Now," said Bleys, "that leads very nicely into the general plans which are part of what I came here to tell you. But I couldn't in conscience tell them to someone who wasn't organized to accept them."

"All right," said Hammer stubbornly. "Our only sure hope of survival has to be having only one man here—the person in charge—holding the ultimate reins of power; and able to make his own decisions about handling things. This isn't Association, you know. Those secret files you looked at were simply part of my attempt to protect this organization, if it ever should be cut off and we had to operate on our own."

"I hardly think that Dahno would be satisfied with that answer," said Bleys mildly.

"I know he won't!" said Hammer, doggedly. "You know he won't. It's still the answer. I'll ask you again—what is it you want?"

"What do I want?" Bleys echoed. He leaned back into his chair and steepled his long fingers together before him. "What is it Dahno wants? What is it any of us want, including you? You see, Hammer, those are all meaningless questions. It assumes we're only concerned with ourselves. But we aren't. Now you certainly knew that when you left Association. I'm sure you know it now as well."

"Of course," said Hammer, "we want the full organization to grow and gain in power. But—"

"Quite right," Bleys' voice overrode his, "the full organization, Hammer. I'm sure you remember Dahno talking about its ultimate future. Well, the time to begin work on that future is now. It affects everybody."

"Everybody?" Hammer said. "You mean Dahno—and maybe you, too, as well?"

"I mean Us—every Other alive," said Bleys patiently. "Think for a moment. We're an organization because we're a people. A different people. We have the advantage of the fresh and better thinking of the cross-breed. Whatever improvement or refinement humanity's discovered in one special Splinter Culture, joined to whatever advantage another Splinter Culture may have."

"Not all cross-breeds have that," said Hammer.

"No," said Bleys, "not all. But it's important that the general public on all the worlds come to think of all Splinter Culture cross-breeds as specially talented. That way, there's enough of us to form a people. We may be scattered, and are; many cross-breeds don't even know us who're in the Organization. But we want to convince them, as well as the general public, that we're all a special people—born to be leaders of the ordinary human race."

"How're we supposed to do that?" asked Hammer. Some of the tension had gone out of his voice, and Bleys knew that he was beginning to have his effect on the man. "And what's that got to do with me if we do?"

"To answer your first question—by recruiting all crossbreeds into the organization and calling them all 'Others,' just like us. That was always the plan and the time's finally come to put it to work. To answer the second question—can't you see that doing so would make you a kingpin in a very large and powerful organization indeed?"

He paused to let Hammer absorb that idea. He began to feel that he was beginning to capture the man. It was not only that Hammer had hesitated, and was sitting absorbing the notion. His very posture was different. A great deal of the muscle tension hewed by his recent antagonism to Bleys, had gone from him on seeing in what Bleys was telling him his personal future.

"Yes," said Hammer slowly, at last; and Bleys could see the attractiveness of the idea had caught him. "It'd make us much more of a power among the stars."

"The power," said Bleys.

"That's something that wasn't talked about when I was in training," said Hammer, still thoughtful.

"The time wasn't ready, then, to mention it," said Bleys.

"And I don't remember Dahno talking about it in his graduation address to us, either," said Hammer.

"No, you wouldn't have," said Bleys. He leaned back in his chair. "But you see now that while the organization is concerned with the care and feeding and propagation of its own units, in a larger sense we'd be tarred with the same brush, if the news got out that cross-breeds in general had secret corps of assassins."

Hammer was silent for a long moment.

"I see what you mean," he said at last.

"Just suppose something went wrong; and you—or one of the Other organization heads—couldn't stop it in time," said Bleys. "If someone of our organization had an assassin get caught and the connection with the name 'Others' became known, there'd be the danger of triggering off a situation in which the great majority of ordinary people—and they still outnumber us thousands to one—could start to look suspiciously on anyone calling himself an Other."

Once more he paused to let his last words ring in Hammer's ears.

"That," he went on, "we can't afford. We have to make the name something to aspire to, not something to try to exterminate. It's not only that such a pogrom would put us all in danger; but it would make absolutely impossible the workings of our organization. And the organization's our only hope of being recognized for what we are. You follow me?"

Hammer sat for a moment. His eyes were abstract and his whole demeanor was thoughtful. After a few moments, he roused himself from this and looked directly at Bleys.

"And you really see a time when the Others could be a large enough organization to be a power among the stars— generally?" he asked.

"We will own at least the New Worlds," Bleys said; "eventually—maybe eventually Old Earth as well. But it means in addition to supplying Dahno with local information, your major effort from now on will be to recruit any and all cross-breeds on this world into the organization."

Hammer made a wry face.

"What'll we do with them all?" he asked.

"In the long run, find each of them some job for the organization—in the short term, simply make them up in groups and keep them in training until you've got a spot for each," said Bleys.

"Yes ..." said Hammer, drawing the word out thoughtfully. Then he looked up at Bleys. "But you, what're you going to do now?"

Bleys pushed back his chair. "Well, I've got several more days before I leave. I've already thoroughly read up on this world, but I want to check what I read against some personal observation. I'll be spending the rest of my time here looking around. You can get me a pass to the visitors' gallery of the Second House of government, can't you?"

The Second House was the powerful one.

"Oh, certainly," said Hammer, getting to his own feet. But ever since Bleys' argument seemed to have reached him, he had begun to change back from the bristly, antagonistic opponent he had been for most of the time since Bleys started asking to look at his secret files. With this change, his reawakened sense of duty as host to Bleys was brought back to life again. "Wouldn't you rather have me show you around? You ought to be able to enjoy at least part of this trip; and there's a good many things here in the city, or a short flight outside, I think you'd enjoy."

"No. No thank you," said Bleys, "I'd rather get to know the world, as I say. That's the best you can do for me between now and when I leave."

"Well, do you want me to show you around wherever it is you want to look?" Hammer asked.

"No. Specifically no," said Bleys. "I want to see what I want to see with my own eyes and without any influence, no matter how well meant, from anyone with me."

"Well, all right," said Hammer, as the two oi* them went out. "But I’ll want to talk to you at least one more time before you leave."

"Certainly," said Bleys, "just before I leave, on the day I leave. If the ship goes at the right time, we could have lunch and you could put me on it."

"It'd be a pleasure," said Hammer.

Bleys smiled broadly at him; and after a moment Hammer smiled back.

In the next few days Bleys did exactly what he had said he would do. He sat in the visitors' gallery above the floor of the Second House and noted that it was not all that different from the single Chamber on Association. Probably it was not different from most governing bodies everywhere else.

This, however, was a light and airy place, with huge skylights in its domed top that not only made what went on on the floor, Bleys thought, much more pleasant for the people on it, but was a boon to visitors in the gallery. He did note that the representatives he observed did not seem the sort of group that could be led by a few strong, charismatic minds, as was the case with Association.

With this established, he ignored all else to do with government. He turned his attention instead to the business community, and the general state of the city, and even the countryside around it. His general conclusion was that this was even a richer world than he had expected. None of the Younger Worlds, of course, could hold a candle to Old Earth, not only in natural resources still available to modem methods, but in accumulated wealth of different kinds, including a lot which reflected the history of the Mother World.

Bleys' final decision was that Freiland was a planet that could be called upon for a great deal quickly, industrialized as it was, but would exhaust itself in a much shorter time than someplace like Association, which would find trouble giving much, except human bodies. But being mainly an agricultural world, even though there were only a few rich farming areas, it would be slower to fall apart man someplace like the world he was on.

On the other hand, Association belonged to one of the three major Splinter Cultures, all of which were self-doomed; simply because, while the best of the Splinter Cultures had produced the greatest in human development, for that very reason they were less viable in the long run, than a mixed-culture world like Freiland, New Earth, or—again, the ultimate example— Old Earth, itself.

Bleys had told Hammer he wanted to be left alone these last days until just before he took off. But the night before his ship was to leave he got a call from Hammer inviting him to a dinner at which he could meet other members of the original class of trainees who had settled down on this planet. It was not the sort of invitation he could turn down; so he went, but left early on the plea that the spaceship's leaving tomorrow was earlier in the afternoon than he had expected, and he would need his rest.

He did not mention getting together with Hammer personally before he left.

Hammer, however, had not forgotten. He called Bleys the next morning, as soon as he could decently expect Bleys to be up and about—though actually Bleys had been up for a good two hours by that time.

"How about a very early lunch, after which I can take you out to the spaceport?" he asked.

"Fine," said Bleys. They disconnected.

Bleys could almost imagine the words in which Hammer would express the ideas that must have been bubbling inside him, these last few days. He turned out to be very close in his guess. Across the lunch table, after the first few polite exchanges of conversation in which Hammer asked about how satisfying his last few days had been, he dived directly into what was on his mind.

"This whole business of the Others eventually being a power—no, that's right, you said the power among the Younger Worlds," Hammer said, "I've been giving it a good deal of thought. It suggests a number of things. One is we've always made a point not to display the name of Others openly, although we've never denied we called ourselves that. Maybe now we should start talking ourselves up and the name up, to the rest of the planets."

"It might be a bit early for that," answered Bleys. "Here on Freiland, why don't you simply publicize—not extensively, but noticeably—when your organization makes a charitable donation to something needed."

"Yes, that's a thought," said Hammer.

"You might also make a point of looking up cross-breeds who might be in personal or financial difficulties or even in bad health, and doing what you can for them," Bleys went on; "that, you wouldn't even need to publicize. You'd accomplish two things. The cross-breeds not connected with the organization who are nonetheless treated kindly by it, would draw closer to the organization themselves. Instinctively they'd feel a kinship to what knows itself to be an elite group, and they'd also spread the word of what you'd done for them to those like them."

He paused to let this sink in on Hammer. Hammer nodded.

"Granted," said Bleys, "they'd only spread it among those they knew. But there's no rush about having the general public here notice us, until we really are in a position of strength; and, with all due respect to what you've done here, I'll be telling Dahno that with the exceptions you already know about, you've been a good manager of the local organization. But you're still not really a power in Freiland politics. Moreover, I don't expect to find any of the organizations on other Younger Worlds to be powers where they are—yet."

Hammer thought about it for a moment.

"Yes, that makes sense," he said. "Of course there's no reason for us not to begin to be a little more aggressive in getting into positions where we have a finger in the pie of everything of importance around the planet."

He glanced at Bleys.

"You don't object to that, do you?" he asked.

"No, not at all," said Bleys. "In fact it's the sort of thing I'd like to see you all doing; but be very unobtrusive about it. If I were you I'd mention that kind of aim only casually; and even then to one at a time of your own classmates. Also, warn them not to mention it yet to your own recruits who are still learning." Hammer nodded.

"I understand," he said. "You can trust me, Bleys Ahrens. We won't claim anything we don't already have firmly in our grasp. And then we'll mention it just as an incidental matter."

"I think you'll find, as you establish strong bonds of friendship with planetary politicians—nothing but friendship, mind—" said Bleys, "if they're such good friends that they want to loan you or give you funds or anything like that, that's fine. I know you were exposed to the rule we never ask for anything. But I predict once you've formed strong bonds of friendship with a majority of those in power on this planet, the rest will come quickly to you, on their own."

"You think so?" said Hammer.

"I do," answered Bleys, "once you have the whole planet firmly in your grasp, you can begin being open about your superiority; and the superiority of our organization, over anything else locally. But that's still going to be a ways off yet. It'll take a few years, even if things move fairly fast for all of us, to get individual organizations into that sort of position of control."

"Oh, I understand perfectly," said Hammer. "Now, how much of this should I clear with Dahno, or you, before we do it?"

"Try clearing it with me, first," said Bleys. "You know, Dahno has his hands full managing Association himself and our organization there. If I can deal with it, then we've saved him that much of a drain on his time and attention. If not, I can always pass it on to him."

"Excellent," said Hammer. "Then I'll address all information dealing with this to you, first."

Bleys looked at his wrist monitor. It was almost time for him to leave. They had covered everything that he had wanted to cover, and he had done successfully all he had set out to do. He

let Hammer drive him to the spaceport, making general talk about Freiland and the diversity he had noticed, of its peoples, even with common customs. Hammer endorsed the comments and even threw in a few of his own.

An hour and a half later Bleys was in space, in the lounge of the ship that would carry him to Cassida; and watching the starscape, while his mind processed everything of the past week to set it in context with his continually growing picture of the human race and what he must do, when the time came.

Chapter 24

"Ah, Bleys Ahrens! Honored to meet you! Honored!" said a voice rather closer to the floor of the Cassidan terminal than Bleys had expected, as he felt his hand grasped by the hand of a short, slightly rotund man, with his round face wreathed in smiles. "I'm Himandi Messer. You were expecting me to be here, I think?"

"More or less, yes," said Bleys as Himandi pressed his hand warmly and came very close to pumping it up and down in a way that had been customary centuries ago.

He had indeed been expecting Himandi, who was the leader of the local Others association. Bleys looked down now at a man who was clearly in his forties.

Bleys, who had had some contact by letter with Himandi before his coming, had looked for clues in the letter to Himandi's background, but it had been impossible for him to say what kind of a cross-breed he was, and which Splinter Cultures had come together to produce him—usually a situation that indicated the man did not know who his parents were. He had tested out as pure Exotic.

Bleys would have guessed a certain amount of Exotic parentage, but that was as far as supposition could take him. In any case, he was undeniably capable.

"But you came direct from Freiland!" said Himandi, finally releasing his hand. "I rather thought you'd stop at Newton first?"

"Why? asked Bleys.

Himandi chuckled deeply.

"Oh," he said, "it's just that I thought as long as you were this far you might want to spend some time looking at Newton. It's a remarkable place—" His voice trailed off. At the moment he even looked almost uncomfortable.

"No," said Bleys, "as I've been telling people along the way, this isn't in any sense a recreational trip. I'm making these visits purely for business reasons."

"Oh, I see. Well, certainly ..." Himandi babbled on as he drew Bleys deeper into the terminal. Bleys understood what was behind that question of his about Newton. It was very nearly a reflex in most Cassidans.

Cassida was a technological world, where technicians were taught, put to work and exported when profitable to other planets like Association for difficult projects like putting in a Core Tap.

It was a world that had an almost symbiotic relationship with Newton; and Newton was a world primarily of research scientists, who were supported in this labor of pure research by the occasional licensing of some discovery that was useful and marketable to the technicians on Cassida.

Cassida had the people and the facilities to turn such things into concrete realities that could be sold on other worlds, including even Old Earth.

The relationship, however, extended even to the social areas of both planets. In spite of several hundred years of association there was still a covert tendency on the part of the Newtonian scientists to look down their nose slightly at Cassidans—and a sneaking tendency on the part of the Cassidans, which they would never admit but which showed itself in questions like the one Himandi had asked just now—to look up to and imitate Newton.

It was an influence which reached into every branch of Cassidan life. It even affected their governmental structure. Newton was ruled by a twelve-man Board of Governors. Beneath that Board there was a large unwieldy body that consisted of scientists of enough seniority and repute to qualify as members of it—like top members of a teaching staff at a college or university—but of whom there were so many that it was difficult to find a place to get them all gathered together for any kind of lawmaking.

The result was that the lower body, which called itself the House of Representatives, could actually meet only once a year in a large underground stadium. Except in some very rare instances, it simply went through the motions of rubber-stamping the decisions that had already been made by the Board of Governors during that year.

All this information, Bleys had absorbed in the process of studying these two worlds before his trip here. The awkward type of government set up on Newton had inevitably had its effect, if on a more practical level, on Cassida. Here, they also had upper and lower houses of government. The lower one had only about double the numbers of the upper, however, so that the law-making process could go on most of the year around.

Also, on Cassida the lower house was much more ready on occasion to override the upper house. This would all be something that Bleys would have to take into account—this business of Newton's influence—when he came to seeing what kind of work the local organization was doing. His own conclusion from studying the matter back on Association was that in spite of everything, Cassida's upper house was still the one with the power. Theoretically, the organization should have concentrated its attention quite strongly on that.

Aside from that, Cassida was a business-oriented world and they should also have their connections and their influence reaching out into the area of business and commerce.

He had been listening to, without hearing, Himandi Messer. But now the other man, almost trotting beside him as they went

toward the front of the terminal, was asking him questions which required some answer.

"... What would you like first, now?" Himandi was saying, "a chance to rest? A meal? Or should we just go someplace and sit where we can have some light refreshment, while you tell me in more detail what your plans are for the days you're here?"

"The last, I think," said Bleys.

"Fine, fine!" said Himandi, coding away at his wrist monitor, "I've sent your luggage to the Elysium. I think you'll like it. It's the best hotel we've got here. Now, the place we'll be going to is right close to the hotel. Come along with me."

Bleys continued with him to the basement parking area where an auto-call had already brought Himandi's magnetic car into the waiting line of those already summoned by people who were leaving the terminal. It was actually the first time he had ridden in a magnetic car, which instead of riding on an air cushion like Dahno's hovercar, rode on magnets that worked against the ones in the road bed to keep the vehicle floating above the ground. Dahno, Bleys knew, could easily have had one of these, rather than his lesser, unimpressive hovercar that traveled on its air cushion, but he was far too wise to attract attention in that way.

Bleys wondered how wise Himandi was to drive what he did.

However, once out on the highways, Bleys noticed Himandi's type of car was far in the majority of the vehicles he saw. Cassida was, of course, a much more wealthy planet than Association; perhaps Himandi's car was unremarkable here.

The lounge Himandi took Bleys to seemed to be part of a hotel that was not the Elysium, to which his baggage had already been sent. Nonetheless, the room they sat down in was a very pleasant room with a number of little conversational circles and padded floats within them. About half the seating areas were occupied by groups; but Bleys noticed as they walked past these that even within a few feet it was impossible to hear any sound of voices from the people talking less than a few feet away. Apparently some invisible sound-blocks were in place.

It was not to be wondered at on a technologically-oriented planet like this.

Once seated, they ordered drinks to which Himandi added a small order of hors d'oeuvre—like finger food. Fruit juice varied in taste from planet to planet, even when it was the juice of the same fruit, because of differences in soil and environment. Therefore, Bleys stayed away from the fruit juices and instead settled for a dry ginger ale, that was a common and uniform thing on all the spaceships and all the worlds, being specifically made for travelers like himself who might have trouble with a change in food tastes every couple of weeks. Himandi ordered some kind of alcoholic drink, and drank it with as much gusto as Dahno, although not with Dahno's gargantuan capacity.

"Now tell me," said Himandi,"what would you like first? You probably want to rest the rest of today. But this evening or tomorrow we could have a general meal at which all the original members of the organization here could be present and you could meet them. Or would you rather look over the city first?"

"I think I might as well start at the top," said Bleys. "I'd like to see your offices, both the general office and your own private office and anything connected with it in the way of a file room."

"Certainly! Certainly!" said Himandi. "And you'll want to go through the files. Very good. Very good, indeed. And of course you'll want to see the secret files too?"

An alarm bell went off in the back of Bleys' head. It was just barely possible that news of the fact that he had insisted on seeing Hammer's secret files could have reached Himandi here before him. It might barely have been arranged by mailing a letter ahead on a ship that made a connection to Cassida, before Bleys' direct flight had left Freiland. There were two or three days lead time that might have made this possible.

But besides being unlikely, it would require that Hammer had written directly to Himandi himself. That was hardly to be considered. There was no reason for the heads of the Other separate world organizations to be secretly in correspondence. A more likely possibility—unless the offer had been completely innocent—was that the free offering of secret files was an attempt to divert Bleys' attention from something that might be hidden somewhere else in the organization.

"I'll want to see everything, of course," said Bleys pleasantly. "And I'm not at all tired from my trip. After we finish here, why don't we simply go straight to your office?"

"Yes! Absolutely!" said Himandi.

Himandi's outer office, with two people—men in this instance—working busily at a couple of desks with piles of messages in code, had no essential difference from the outer office of Hammer—or Dahno's, for that matter. Himandi introduced Bleys to the two men working there; and then led the way into his own office, which was almost spartan by comparison with Hammer's and Dahno's, but at the same time had a touch of elegance about it that was almost oriental.

Without hesitation, Himandi led the way further into a file room opening off this inner office, and.settled Bleys in a float-chair before a large screen.

"Where would you like to start first?" Himandi asked.

"I generally go alphabetically," murmured Bleys. "I'll work through your files that way. These are the secret files or the general files?"

"The general files!" said Himandi."I thought you'd like to see those first."

"Quite right, I would," answered Bleys. He activated the screen, the controls of which were the same—in fact all such controls were universal on most of the Younger Worlds—and began examining the files.

"I'll be getting some work of my own done in my personal office," said Himandi, "—unless, that is, you want me here with you?"

"It's not necessary," said Bleys. "By all means do what you want; but stay close in case I have questions for you."

"Oh, of course," said Himandi, and went out, gently closing the door of the file room behind him.

Bleys went through the considerable number of open files he could find. They were similar enough to the ones that Hammer and Dahno kept, so that he could go through these even more swiftly than he had gone through Hammer's. Essentially, he was looking for references that left question marks in his mind.

It was at times like this that he felt a small, pleasurable feeling of excitement. It was one of the few opportunities that came to him to open himself up, so to speak, and put his whole ability to a job, even as simple a job as this one. It was like being in a low-flying airship, racing at low altitude at top speed, over a terrain with which he was fully familiar, his vision keyed to pick up anything unusual or different.

In this particular case, the one thing that struck him most strongly, was that the contacts of all the Other members of the Cassida organization were almost completely with members of the lower house. He could find no reason in the rest of the information on file as to why they should be restricting themselves unduly. He tucked the information away for future consideration.

Less than two hours after he had begun he went back to the outer office, where Himandi was at work at his desk. The other looked up, then jumped to his feet as he recognized Bleys.

"Yes?" Himandi said. "There's something I can help you with?"

"Not directly," said Bleys. "I've simply finished going through the general files. I'm ready to look at those secret ones of yours now."

Himandi stared at him in disbelief.

"You've finished with the general files?" he asked.

"Yes," said Bleys, "as I just said, I'm ready for the secret files now."

"But—" Himandi almost stammered, "you couldn't go through all those files in just this much time. I was assuming it'd take you days—maybe a week—to do anything like that."

"As I told Hammer Martin, who heads the organization for us on Freiland," said Bleys, "I'm a fast reader. Now about those secret files—"

"Why, right away. Right away," said Himandi. But his face was darkened by a puzzled frown as he went past Bleys into the file room and sat down himself before the screen.

As Bleys stood and watched him Himandi carefully set up a code on the screen, which dissolved- into a picture of large letters saying: top secret, available only to those with clearance.

He put in another code, the screen cleared and the word ready appeared. Himandi reached into his pocket for a bunch of keys, selected one and stuck it in the slot beside the control pad. The screen cleared again and once more the words top secret appeared on the screen.

Bleys watched with interest. Everything that Himandi had done, except use the key, was sheer flummery. No code input to a machine like this could keep out those who knew and understood such devices.

Himandi got up from the seat before the screen, his smile back on him and apparently all puzzlement and surprise forgotten.

"Just punch the open key for A, and you can go through these files, just like you did the others. They're much shorter."

"Thanks," Bleys sat down before the screen, "in that case, it shouldn't take long."

He did not turn his head, but he heard the file room door click softly closed again behind him as Himandi went back out.

He began to go through the secret files. They seemed to consist mainly of dossiers; those on a number of governmental and business and even some militia people, but also complete dossiers on all the members of the Others group in the Cassida organization. It seemed that a good deal of work had been put into compiling as much information as necessary about the people working under Himandi.

But that was not what riveted Bleys' attention particularly. It was the fact that a great many of the political figures, on whom there were files, were from the upper house. There seemed only one conclusion; and that was that Himandi was personally almost exclusively in contact with those known friends and associates of the organization in the more powerful branch of the government. That meant his subordinate classmates handled the less important people.

Bleys reached the end of the secret files, and switched off the screen. He sat for a few seconds, thinking, then got up and went back out into Himandi's office. The other man was once more at his desk and at work. Just as before, however, he jumped to his feet and came around the desk, leaving the work behind at the sight of Bleys.

"You're really through with the secret files, too?" he asked incredulously.

"Yes," said Bleys. "Now I think I'd better go to my hotel and sleep on what I've read. Perhaps you could set up passes for me tomorrow to the visitors' gallery of both the government houses."

"Oh, absolutely!" said Himandi, leading the way to the door to the outer office.

In his suite at the Elysium Hotel, which was a good deal larger than Bleys needed and luxurious to the point of ostentation, Bleys ordered up a light dinner. Himandi had already left. Outside, the day was beginning to fade into the planet's early twilight. It was his intention to do exactly what he had told Himandi he would do—sleep on the material he had scanned this afternoon. It was one thing to put the information into his mind, another thing to fully consider it. He had discovered that this was best done during sleep hours.

But, just at that moment, the phone on the control pad at the end of the sofa, only a few feet from his elbow, rang. He swung around on his seat float, and keyed on the phone.

"Hello?" he said.

"Bleys Ahrens?" said an anonymous male voice at the other end.

"Speaking," said Bleys.

"We have some interplanetary mail for you that evidently just caught up with you, down here at the desk. It just came in. Should I send it up?"

"Where's it from?" Bleys asked.

"The superscript on one piece of mail says Association," answered the voice, "the other says Ceta. Shall I send them up?" "Yes," said Bleys.

CHAPTER 25

It took a little under five minutes for the uniformed attendant to ring the lounge doorbell of the suite and be admitted with the letters. Bleys, unsure whether to tip the man, played safe and did so. Customs differed from planet to planet. On some planets tips were practically demanded. On others they were an insult. Here, it appeared, a tip was not an insult. The attendant smiled broadly, thanked him and went out.

Bleys looked at the travel envelopes of both letters. They were both hand-addressed to him, in different but similar handwriting. The one from Ceta had been written a good two interstellar months previously. The one from Association was barely a week and a half old.

Bleys ripped open the older envelope first. He found inside a regulation military envelope, once again addressed to him with a return address that was merely a military code number. He opened it and glanced at the last page. It was a letter from Henry's youngest son, Will, its two pages covered with close handwriting on both sides—probably the military limit imposed upon Will. He must somehow have ended up in the militia. Bleys read it:

Dear Bleys,

I'm not allowed to tell you where we are, and it really doesn't matter anyway. There was a draft from our area just a couple of months ago, and now it seems in no time at all I've been through training and am already here on Ceta as part of a force that may be seeing combat soon. On the other hand, we may not. They tell us very little.

I've written Joshua and Father; but I wanted to write you too—simply because I don't know what may be the next chance I get to write, or what may happen to us.

I just wanted to tell you that I missed you, after you left the farm and your visits from time to time brightened all our days. Joshua was always the strong one—after Father, that is—but you were strong too, in a different way. As I remember being young, I remember how safe I used to feel with the two of you and Father. I was always the weak one. And I'm afraid I still am.

I do not feel safe now. I know that it is my duty to the Lord to be chosen for one of the expeditionary units; and that what our services earn will help everyone back home. But I'm not particularly close to anyone else in my Group; and without Father, Joshua, and particularly you, I feel very exposed, sometimes.

I can place my dependence in God and do, but somehow what I miss, even in a way I don't miss Joshua and Father not being close, I miss your understanding of things. I think that somehow if I understood more why God should arrange it that I was sent here, I would be a better soldier for Him.

You would understand this situation if you were in it; and if you were here you could explain it to me, so that I would feel less alone. Somehow, it is even a comfort to write you like this. Not as good, but something like having you here in person. Because, as I say, I know if you were here you would understand and you would show me how to understand.

There's not much space to write on these pieces of note paper they issue us, so I'll close now.

God and my prayers be with you, Bleys.

All my love, Will

At total variance with his usual habits, Bleys read the letter through several times, trying to reach through its words to a picture of Will sitting in his black expeditionary uniform, somewhere on Ceta; with a piece of paper on some kind of makeshift desk, like a board across his knees, writing it. Will would be nearly eighteen now, but his letter showed him still very young inside; as he had always been young for his years.

Finally, Bleys put that letter down on a table and opened the other one. This one, from only about ten days ago and in bolder handwriting, was from Joshua.

Dear Bleys,

I tried to call you in Ecumeny from the store, because I thought you would want to know, but they say you're off-planet at the moment. So I've written this letter, asking your organization and Dahno's to forward it on to you wherever you are.

I'm writing you, because I know it would be difficult for Father to do so. He hasn't told me that, but when I volunteered first to phone, and then to write he did not object. I think I could tell he was relieved that I had taken this on me, because of course he says and shows nothing—at least to any other eyes than my own.

Father and I have always felt the strong, comforting hand of the Lord firmly upon us. It has not been Will's fault that maybe at times he did not feel it so strongly. Perhaps if our mother had not died when he was so young, he might have been better armored in his Faith. But he was not; and therefore I know that this business of being chosen by the militia for draft, probably on contingent to be rented out off-world—as indeed it turned out he was—was hard on him.

I spoke to the selection committee for our district and tried hard to get them to take me in his place, since it would be much easier for me to go. But their decision was that I was of more importance to the farm and the farm of more importance to feeding our people; and so I must stay at home. They were in the seats of judgment in which the Lord had put them, and I could not quarrel with their decision, any more than Will could.

I was going to wait until you returned from off-world so that perhaps you could come out to the farm and I could simply tell you about his leaving. But today, we got news that Will, with all of his Group, was taken into the Lord's bosom as part of an action that took place on Ceta in a principality there, the name of which was censored in the letter that informed us of Will's death.

I knew you would want to know as soon as possible, and therefore I'm writing this letter. You must know that Will was very fond of you, as we all were, though it was sadness to all of us that you had never succeeded in giving yourself to God. But you know Father has always said that every man and woman belongs to the Lord in his or her own way, whether they know it or not. For that reason he would never join any of the volunteer evangelistic groups that our church sent into cities and other areas, where the beliefs of the people were either lacking or gone astray. I must rejoice that Will is now with God, even though I mourn him silently as Father does. When you return to Association and Ecumeny, we'll both be very happy if you could make a short visit to us out here. We have not seen you in some time.

God's blessing be on you, Joshua

Bleys laid Joshua's letter down on top of Will's. He stood for a moment, looking at nothing; then picked up both letters and carried them into the bedroom to put them in his personal luggage case. He stood looking at the luggage case after he had relocked it.

Suddenly he shouted with all the force of his lungs. In a lightning movement he spun on one foot, bent over almost parallel to the ground and with the other leg lashed out at the bedroom wall beside him.

There was a crashing sound and an explosion of plaster. The wall, which was only a dividing wall with wooden studs beneath the plaster, suddenly showed a hole big enough for him to put both fists through.

He straightened up, looked at what he had done and after a moment laughed a little, angrily, at himself. He stepped to the phone and signaled the desk.

"I've just made a hole in my wall here," he said. "Send up whoever you have on duty at night and get it repaired."

There was a moment of confusion at the far end and then the voice of the man who had answered got himself under control. "Would you like us to move you to another suite while repairs are being made, Bleys Ahrens?"

"No," said Bleys, "just get them to fix this wall."

He went into the living room and from there onto the balcony. He stood with his hands on the stone-textured upper railing of the balcony, looking at the lights of the Cassidan city below and around him.

He did not see the lights, however, as much as he saw in memory an image of Will throwing himself forward to hug him, in that last moment, when Dahno had taken him from the farm permanently. For the moment he let the memory hold him; then, with an effort of will, he banished it.

If he accomplished the work he would set out to do, it well might be that he, himself, should yet be the cause of the death of both Joshua and Henry, or possibly, Josh's descendants, among millions of others. There was no point in dwelling on the chance that had killed Will.

With an effort he put the matter away. He was concerned that it should touch him at all.

He must not let this sort of thing get in his way. He had never experienced the loss of anyone he cared for. Mainly because, with the exception of his mother, he had been careful never to become close to anyone. He remembered now how instinct had kept him at arm's length from the women trainees of the first class that he had encountered in Ecumeny.

He had not thought that there was in him the capacity to be ensnared by an affection for another being. Not even Dahno— because he knew that Dahno could prove false, as their mother had to them. But, evidently, unknown in him all this time, there was still in him a potential weakness. He could see no cure for it, except to be sure that he stayed at a cautious distance from all other human beings. That was best in any case. It would leave his vision of what must be done, unimpeded.

Behind him, the doorchime rang; and the two cover-suited men outside identified themselves as the night repair crew sent up to work on the wall. He let them in; and then went to the phone in the far end of the living room.

"I've changed my mind," he told the desk. "You can move me to another suite, after all."

Within ten minutes a uniformed attendant was there to move his luggage and guide him to new quarters.

Once settled in his new suite, he went to bed and—after a while—slept soundly.

He was up, dressed and ready to have breakfast sent up, when his phone rang and Himandi's voice spoke in his ear when he keyed it in.

"I thought you might like to have breakfast with me," said Himandi.

"Fine," said Bleys.

They broke the connection and Bleys went down to the breakfast room of the hotel, where he found Himandi already at a table, waiting for him. Bleys sat down, and they ordered.

"I understand you had a small accident with one of the walls of your suite last night," said Himandi, after the morning greetings had been exchanged.

"Yes," replied Bleys in a perfectly level voice, "I had a small accident with one of the walls in my suite."

His eyes were directly upon Himandi's as he spoke; and he continued to hold them there after he finished speaking. Himandi looked away.

"Well, of course," he said, "the local organization wants you comfortable while you're here. If you have any problems, just get in touch with me."

"I don't expect problems," answered Bleys.

Himandi fished in his pockets and came up with two self-adhering badges, which he passed over the table to Bleys.

"One for the lower house, one for the upper," he said. "The minute you step in the front door of the building that encloses both of them, directories will show you the way to either one of the visitors' galleries."

"Thank you," said Bleys.

He put the badges away in his own pocket. They talked about the weather and various minor matters. Once or twice Himandi ventured to veer in the direction of the business part of Bleys' visit. But Bleys was apparently deaf to any such things. He went on talking of inconsequential subjects.

Himandi finally saw him off in an autocar which took him directly to the Government building.

As Himandi had said, once he reached the building that held the two parts of the legislature, Bleys had no trouble finding his way to both the visitors' galleries. The building was open, pleasant and well lit; and directions were frequent and explicit, on plaques on the wall.

He spent a relatively small amount of time in the gallery of the lower house, which was perhaps a quarter filled, with a debate of some kind going on. In the visitors' gallery of the upper house he spent a little bit more time. This particular chamber was almost empty. Only four or five people occupied seats at the individual desks on its floor, listening to one man on his feet, who was making a speech; apparently as much for the record as for those listening. After a while, Bleys left this gallery too and went out to find a phone.

He called Himandi, and found him at his office.

"I'd like to talk to Director Albert Chin," Bleys said. "He's one of your clients. Can you arrange for me to see him for perhaps fifteen minutes, right now?"

"If he's in his office," said Himandi, "I can try. Do you want to call me back in about half an hour? There's a very good restaurant on the ground floor. You might want to go down there and put in the time having something to drink."

"Yes," said Bleys. "Call me there. I'll leave word when I go in that I'm expecting a phone call."

He broke the connection and went down to find the restaurant. As Himandi had said it was both a pleasant and a comfortable restaurant. He ordered the same ginger ale he had ordered after getting off the spaceship from Freiland, and sat with it, examining what the back of his mind had picked out of the wealth of material he had absorbed yesterday that seemed worthy of attention.

He had counted over forty Directors, as members of the upper house were known—probably in imitation of the Newton Board of Directors—who had been in the files as consulting with Himandi at one time or another.

That was very close to being two-thirds of the total membership of the upper house. He had picked Chin's name at random from the rest; simply because his appointment with Himandi had been only three weeks before, according to the secret file on Chin. This was time enough for whatever he had consulted about to show some results; and also time enough to raise a further question about the relationship between Chin and Himandi.

The meeting had been briefly labeled "a discussion of investments" and this enigmatic subject had also caught at Bleys' interest.

He had been sitting there sometime longer than half an hour, perhaps as much as forty-five minutes, when a speaker on his table came to life.

"Bleys Ahrens?" said the voice from the table speaker. "There's a call for you. You can take it at your table if you like, if you'll just punch the outside phone stud. Bleys Ahrens, have you received this message?"

"I hear you," said Bleys. He pressed the outside phone stud and spoke into the voice grille of the table.

"This is Bleys Ahrens. Did you want to reach me?"

"Bleys Ahrens," came back a female voice, "Director Chin will see you right away. Are you in the building?"

"Yes, down in the restaurant," said Bleys.

"If you'll come up right away then," said the voice at the other end.

"I'll be there immediately," Bleys said.

Director Albert Chin was indeed close. He turned out to be only several floors up and a short walk down a corridor. Three secretaries, two women and a man, were in his outer office. It was one of the women, in something more like a dark green robe than a dress, but which however fitted her dark hair and aquiline face, who let him into the inner office.

"Bleys Ahrens!" the Director said, rising from behind his desk. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Bleys, and had been good-looking in his own way at one time. But a certain amount of extra weight had softened the line of his jaw and produced a slight potbelly. He was possibly in his mid-forties.

"Yes indeed, Director," said Bleys, coming up to the desk. They clasped hands and the Director immediately sat down, motioning Bleys to an armchair float opposite.

"I understand you're something of a traveling inspector for your organization," said Albert Chin. "Himandi mentioned you'd probably only want a word or two with me."

"That's right," said Bleys. "Himandi's Vice-Chairman of the branch of the organization here, as you know. I'm Senior Vice-Chairman for all our organization. I wanted to talk to one of his clients, simply to round out the picture before I leave."

"You're leaving so soon then?" asked Chin.

"Yes, at the end of the week," said Bleys. "I go next to Ste. Marie."

"I see," said Chin. "Now, what can I tell you?"

"First I wanted your confirmation that you're one of the personal clients of Himandi," Bleys said.

"Yes," said Chin. He smiled a little, "as a matter of fact I wouldn't feel satisfied, dealing with anyone but the top member of your organization. You understand. After all, R.H.I.P. Rank Has Its Privileges, Bleys Ahrens. As you undoubtedly know." Bleys nodded.

"I take it you're quite happy with him, then?" said Bleys.

"Absolutely. In fact," said Chin, "Himandi's become something of an old friend. I'd be tempted to stick with him, even if for some reason he ceased to be the ranking member of your organization, here."

"I'm glad to hear that," said Bleys. "That's the sort of thing I'll be reporting on to our Chairman when I get back to our headquarters. Let's see now, you see Himandi fairly frequently then?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say frequently," answered Chin. "Several times a year."

"And I think the last time the two of you talked was the twenty-fourth of last month?"

"Was it? I don't always remember these things offhand," said Chin, "I could have one of the secretaries look it up—oh yes, I'remember—it was just when we were passing Bill K410 of this season."

"And you haven't seen him since?"

"Since?" There was surprise and a little touch of defensive-ness in Chin's voice. But then he smiled and his voice was easy again. "No. No, I'm sure about that."

Bleys stood up. Behind the desk Chin rose also.

"Well, I'm happy to have had a chance to talk to you on such short notice," said Bleys. "It was very good of you to make time for me."

"Not at all, not at all," said Chin. "Your organization— well, that is, Himandi, at least—certainly fills a useful purpose as far as I'm concerned."

They clasped hands again and Bleys went out; Chin reseating himself behind Bleys before he had completely left the room and becoming engrossed in some papers on his desk.

Bleys closed the door to Chin's private office behind him and nodded at the secretaries as he left. He went downstairs again and called for an autocar. As he stepped into it, he

phoned Himandi's office. Himandi himself answered the phone.

"I had a very pleasant talk with Director Albert Chin," Bleys said into his phone as the cab was taking him toward Himandi's office. "I'm on my way over to see you now."

"Now? Right now?" said Himandi.

"Yes. Why?" asked Bleys. "Is there any reason I can't talk to you now?"

"No, no, not at all," said Himandi, "in fact why don't I meet you at the door and we'll take your autocar on to someplace where we can have lunch?"

"Excellent," said Bleys, and broke the connection..

They ended up at a two-person table in a small, but very comfortable, restaurant that reminded Bleys of the ones that Dahno had used to take him to on Bleys' visits to Ecumeny. Bleys opened the conversation.

"I don't suppose," he said to Himandi, once their drinks had been placed before them, "you've ever thought of doing a survey to find out how many Others there are on Cassida?"

Himandi looked startled.

"There aren't any Others outside of those in our organization," he said.

"No, no, you've got to think beyond that," said Bleys gently. "Where do you draw your local trainees from?"

"Why, from the local mixed-breeds—" Himandi's eyes had just narrowed. "You mean I should consider anyone who's a genetic mix from Splinter Cultures, from the Dorsai, the Exotics or the Friendlies—as an Other?"

"That's exactly what I mean," said Bleys. "You have to look into the future of the organization. I suggest you do a survey and note any mixed-breeds currently on Cassida who fill the qualifications. In the general sense they're all Others. They just aren't part of the organization yet."

"Yet?" Himandi stared at him.

"Yes," said Bleys, "you've got to see that with an organization like ours, we either go up or go down. Either we gain more and more influence; or we reach a point of stasis, from which the only way is down in importance and influence. That way, eventually we disappear. We have to look beyond our present lifetimes, you and I, Himandi."

"But—" Himandi shrugged, staring. "Why should we look beyond our lifetimes? The upcoming members of the organization can take care of themselves when the time comes. Also, just how far do you expect an organization like we have here on Cassida to grow? How far do you expect all our branches, on all the worlds, to grow?"

"Until they control all the Worlds," said Bleys.

His eyes were fastened on Himandi; but it was not those that were emphasizing what he was saying. It was his deep-toned, trained voice, which had Himandi focused completely now; and within that focus Bleys thought he should now be able to handle the other man.

"Would you want to stop at less?" he asked. "If you look at it closely, we're as different from the ordinary run of mankind as another species of Homo sapiens. Potentially—at least. It isn't a question of our being able to gain control eventually, it's an inevitability; unless some of us fall by the wayside and don't keep pushing in that direction. In which case, as I said, we dwindle and disappear."

"But you're talking about thousands of mixed-breeds," said Himandi. "I can't give you the population of Cassida, offhand, but perhaps as much as half of one per cent of it, maybe even a bit more, could be Others under that definition."

"Are Others," Bleys corrected. "Stop and think, Himandi. We've gone from where we had no influence to where we are now. Here on Cassida you and your classmates have gone from a handful of unknown men and women to a position of relative influence and authority."

He paused.

' "Otherwise, would you have taken it so easily, having to pay for the repair of a wall in a hotel room? If you can come from zero to this point, why not continue?"

He paused again. He had Himandi's whole attention now. For the other man the dining room around him had ceased to exist.

"Think of it for a moment, Himandi. The possibility wasn't mentioned in the early days to trainees; or even to organization heads like yourself on other planets, once you were set up and thriving. But the time's come now to recognize a goal. We're inevitably going to end up leading the rest of the human race, as an elite. We've been bound from the start to rise to the top, as cream rises in milk. And now it's time for at least our senior members to see and understand this. You can see and understand it, now that I've mentioned it, can't you?" He stopped and waited.

Himandi sat where he was, not moving, not even picking up his glass. Finally he sighed.

"You're right," he said, "it's been inevitable from the start."

"Exactly," said Bleys. "Now that you use it you've got to begin to operate on it, as a basis, starting with a survey and census of the Others on this world; who don't yet recognize themselves as Others, except for perhaps feeling alone and apart from the general run of humanity. You do follow me?"

Himandi picked up his glass and drank deeply of it.

"Yes. Yes," he said, "I see it now, very clearly."

"It'll mean a change in the organization itself, to handle and employ many more individuals; and to do that there'll have to be changes in the organization structure. I won't give you any suggestions or directions about what you might do here, outside of taking that survey, but you ought to be thinking of how you'd handle an organization of thousands."

"I will," said Himandi, "beginning now."

"Good," said Bleys, "that's why I'm going to see if I can plead your case with Dahno, to let you stay in charge, here."

CHAPTER 26

It took a moment for the shock of what Bleys had just said to bring Himandi out of the state of light hypnosis into which Bleys had led him; and make him realize what Bleys' words had implied.

"I—don't understand," he said.

"You're an excellent manager," said Bleys, "and as far as I can see you've done many things right here, considering the conditions with which you had to work. I thought at first that you might have some personal ambition or interest in corralling all the Directors of the upper house as your personal clients—"

"No, no," began Himandi. "You don't understand how it is—"

Bleys smiled and held up a hand to stop him.

"Then I found out today," he went on, "that as the situation exists, the members of that group would almost require to be handled by the head of our organization with his or her personal attention. On the other hand, you've made some classic mistakes. However, I'm beginning to think that I'll find

these same mistakes made by nearly all the heads of all our out-world suborganizations. It's possible to tell a lot from the files you made accessible to me, cross-connecting information from one file to another and from one situation to another. For one thing, when was the last time you had a meeting with Albert Chin?"

"Why—I don't know offhand," Himandi said. "It'll be in the files—"

"What's in the files is the date of the twenty-fourth of last month. You haven't met with him at least once since then?"

"What gives you the idea I might have?" asked Himandi, "I'm sure—"

"Himandi," interrupted Bleys gently, "remember what I was just talking about? I'll do what I can to persuade Dahno to keep you here in your present position; but beginning right now you'll have to tell me the truth. Also, make available to me the things you've had hidden. Now, again—when was the last time you saw Albert Chin?"

"A week ago, Wednesday," said Himandi, looking down at his plate.

"Exactly," said Bleys. "I'm glad you decided against any more evasions and false answers. Now, that last meeting didn't happen to have to do with some kind of payment to you personally, did it? Let's say, some kind of gift to you personally?"

"It was in the way of a . . . retainer," said Himandi, still looking down at his plate. "I get it quarterly from everyone in the upper house who's a client."

"I thought so," said Bleys. "It brought up the immediate question of whether you were merely trying to line your pockets, or what kind of use you had for this income. However, after studying the available files, I'm sure that you weren't thinking of making yourself rich. What you wanted was to set up a fund that nobody would know about; against any sudden emergency, such as finding yourself cut off permanently from Dahno and with the ultimate control of the organization in your hands only. Am I right?"

Himandi looked at him, lifting his eyes from the plate and the table with a surprised look on his face.

"How did you guess that?" he asked.

"I didn't guess it," said Bleys. "For someone who's able to study and understand the files you let me see, it was obvious your heart and soul were in the organization here. But you were operating it defensively; and that's not the way it'll need to be handled from now on."

He paused to give the other a chance to speak. Himandi said nothing. Bleys went on.

"Since we face a period of expansion, possibly even within the next few years, you're going to have to stop being protective and become aggressive. In short, you're going to have to take more chances and not rely so much on being able to take care of yourself if you're left alone, but on being part of an inevitable movement toward a larger future. I've no direct evidence of any of this—but then I don't need it for Dahno. He'll take my word for it. But I can see clearly enough to recognize some other things. First, I want you to disband whatever kind of armed or strong-arm organization you've set up."

Himandi's eyes widened.

"You're a clairvoyant!" he said. "How did you tell that from the files I showed you?" Bleys smiled.

"It was a guess," he answered, "but a solid one."

"I . . . didn't set it up," Himandi said. "I just have an agreement with one of the local military leaders to have the use of certain specially trained troops, if I should need them."

"I'd like you to sever that connection," said Bleys. "Anything like that is like a loaded gun around the house. Someone who otherwise might not shoot anyone else in an argument, just might if the weapon was handy. Now, and finally—will you show me your actual, top-secret files?"

"Yes," said Himandi. "Any time you want."

Bleys pushed his chair float back from the table.

"Right now," he said.

Half an hour later, in Himandi's office, he was deep into a brief, but very revealing, set of records. The information these contained would have been enough to make Dahno react, if Bleys had even needed to show his half-brother.

"Actually," said Bleys, closing off the final secret files and handing the key to them back to Himandi, who had sat in the file room with him, waiting while he went through them, , "what I've seen now confirms a belief that you're far and away the best person to run the organization on Cassida. I want you to send me word when you've put the existence of these tapes on open record, and made them available to anyone like myself who's qualified to see them. Also, I want to hear you've ended your agreement with the military; just as I'd like to hear you've started the survey and the census. As you let me know these things are done, I'll present them to Dahno in the best possible light."

"Do you think—?" Himandi did not finish. "As I said—I think I can persuade him to keep you," said Bleys, "yes.

"Now," he went on, "I'll spend the rest of the days I have here before leaving, by getting to know as much of certain areas of government and business as I can. The last world I stopped at, I met the rest of the members of the original class of trainees who were sent out there at a dinner the night before Heft. I'd like to do that again."

"It's an excellent idea," said Himandi, "excellent. But you won't fall out of touch with me the rest of the time you're here, will you?"

"No," said Bleys, "nothing could please me more than seeing you make a start on those things I asked you to do, so I could tell Dahno that they were already underway at the time I left."

In the next few days before his ship took him off to Ste. Marie, he spent his time as he had on Freiland, taking the pulse of the business climate of the planet and the structure and operation of the government. These were things he would need to know in the future and were not connected with the purpose of his present trip—which in itself was not exactly what he had given Dahno to understand it to be.

Far from his making this trip to acquaint himself with the organizations, he had made it to begin his contacts with those same organizations and if possible to point them in the right direction. On both Freiland and Cassida he had been able to do just that.

Such good fortune could not go on without some kind of an interruption. Ste. Marie was a small but relatively rich world under the same sun of Procyon A as Kultis, Mara and the mining world of Coby. Coby had no organization and Kultis and Mara of course were the Exotic worlds where an organization would have been useless.

The organization on Ste. Marie was correspondingly small and slightly more relaxed. Nonetheless, because it had been involved in a great deal of use of off-world mercenary military, the planet had a fair number of cross-breeds that could be brought into the organization. As a mainly pastoral planet, it would be useful but not remarkable.

However, it was on Ste. Marie that the organization was run by a lady named Kim Wallech. Like the organizations on Freiland and Cassida, she had some very private files that she was not eager to make available to Bleys.

At the same time she had a disconcerting tendency to agree with everything he suggested and predicted for the future, and yet balked at opening up the private areas of her command.

She was obviously the kind of person who fights to the last ditch and then disconcertingly finds one ditch more behind that one she has been finally forced to abandon.

However, at last she gave in; and agreed to modify the organization, eliminating those things that Bleys suggested should be eliminated or changed. Bleys' private opinion of her, as a matter of fact, was that of the three leaders of suborgani-zations he had spoken to so far, she was probably the most capable and steadfast.

His next stop was at Ceta, a large planet which had a surface gravity no greater than that of Old Earth. Old Earth's gravity had always been one of the measures by which other worlds had been chosen for settlement.

The last two stops were on New Earth and finally Harmony;

and on each one, Bleys encountered roughly similar situations with the head of the local organizations; and used roughly similar methods of persuasion.

This, with the aim of not only getting the organizations themselves to prepare for change, but to bind them to himself; ostensibly—to begin with—merely as channels through which official business could be transacted between them and Dahno. Some three months after leaving, according to the interstellar calendar, he was standing once more back on the surface of Association.

He checked in by phone with Dahno, from the terminal, to explain that he would like to go out and visit Henry and Joshua first, even before meeting with Dahno, to let them know that he shared in their loss of Will.

Dahno was quick in agreeing. His ready emotions had apparently responded almost immediately to the news of Will's death. He had already made visits to the farm and used all his untouchable persuasive skill to lift the spirits of the two of the family that were left.

This, Bleys thought, must have been a remarkable effort, even for Dahno; since Henry would probably not discuss his dead youngest son at all; and Joshua would find it painful to discuss Will, limiting his talk about his brother as much as possible.

Nonetheless, there were ways of being comforting simply by being there—overflowing the one chair that could hold Dahno's weight, in their front room; lending a hand about the farm, which he had done for a large number of years; and generally radiating sympathy.

Accordingly, Bleys was not too surprised when Dahno told him to take as much time as he wanted with Henry and Joshua.

It was after dark when Bleys pulled a rental hovercar into the yard of the farm. The lights were on inside the house. By this time, he knew, both Henry and Joshua would have had their dinner. Also they could not have failed to hear the roar of the air cushion of his hovercar and driving jets coming up the farm road.

Consequently, it was Joshua—not Henry—just as Bleys had expected, who came bursting out of the door of the farmhouse, as Bleys stepped out of the hovercar, now settled down on the ground.

Joshua was now in his mid-twenties, but he ran to the car almost as Will had run in that one moment when Bleys had left for the city. He did not throw his arms around Bleys, though, as Will had done, but merely put out his hand, which Bleys took; and they grasped each other strongly for an emotional moment.

"I knew you'd be here as soon as you could be, Bleys!" said Joshua. "Oh, but it's good to see you!"

"It's good to be here," said Bleys; and found he meant it.

"Bleys—" said Joshua as together they both headed for the house, "you won't bring up the subject of Will until- Father does, will you?"

"No, I wasn't going to," answered Bleys.

They went inside.

Henry was seated at his table, at his paperwork for the sale of the goat milk. He looked up with that brief smile of his. "Welcome, Bleys," he said.

"How you've stretched up!" said Joshua, staring at him in the sudden light of the room. "You're a giant!" Bleys laughed.

"Dahno's still the giant," he said, "not me."

"Are you taller than he is?" asked Henry.

"We're exactly the same height," Bleys said. "But he outweighs me by anywhere from forty to eighty pounds. And none of it's fat."

Joshua had evidently been mending one of the cart harnesses for the goats. It was draped over the chair he had been sitting in. He ducked into what had been the bedroom he had shared with Bleys and Will; and came out again, carrying the oversized chair that Dahno had been used to using on his visits.

"Sit," he said to Bleys. Bleys did so and Joshua went back and retook his own chair, draping the harness over his knees and picking up the awl and the heavily threaded needle he had been using to make holes and sew on a place that needed mending in the leather of the harness. Like Henry, he continued working as they talked. With anyone else, this would have

seemed like a disturbing element to Bleys. But he knew that the two of them had to use every available hour to get all the work done on the farm; and he remembered them this way, always busy, even in the evenings. Here, it was a comfortable, almost a homey thing to sit with them, so occupied.

"You've been off-planet?" Henry asked, without looking up from his papers.

"Yes," said Bleys. He was finding the chair more comfortable than he had expected—not surprising since it had been built for Dahno; and for the past few months, Bleys had been sitting in furniture that was scaled for people a good deal shorter than himself. "I've been on all the worlds where there're extensions of Dahno's organization."

"But not on Ceta?" said Henry, still not raising his head.

"No," Bleys lied, "not on Ceta."

Henry did not say anything and Joshua stepped into the gap in the conversation.

"What were these other worlds like, Bleys?" he asked. It was not just an idle question. Joshua was interested.

Bleys smiled.

"The cities were pretty much all like Ecumeny. The people—the people were pretty much like the people who live in Ecumeny here, when you got right down to it. The same things, business and politics went on."

"Still, it must have been an interesting trip," said Joshua; and there was—for him—almost a wistful note in his voice.

"It wasn't uninteresting," said Bleys, "but nothing I ran into was mind-shaking. You haven't missed a lot by not seeing the places I saw."

"Our work is here, Joshua," said Henry.

"Yes, I know, Father," answered Joshua; in just the same way that Bleys could remember him answering many times when he had lived with them.

It was taken for granted that Bleys would stay the night at least; and hopefully for several days and nights. Joshua had torn out Bleys' old bunk in the boys' room, which in any case would have been too small for Bleys nowadays, and replaced it with a bedframe also made for Dahno, with a couple of mattresses.

This bed had been left in place, in hopes that Bleys would come by soon. So he found himself, after all, at what was now for him the relatively early hour of nine o'clock at night, going to bed in the same room across from Joshua, just as he had when they were boys.

The next day and the next, during the daylight hours, he was out with the two of them working at one thing or another. The alternative to doing so would have been to sit in the farmhouse alone by himself, which was foolish as well as uncomfortable—since he had never taken to killing time very well.

He began by working mostly alongside Joshua. As they worked, Joshua filled him in on many things previously unmentioned, from the years between the time when he had left the farm and the present; and even ventured a few opinions about his father.

"Father would never speak of it," he said, "and as far as he can he'll never show it; but the loss of Will on top of the loss of Mother some years back has lefthim feeling very alone."

They were mending one of the fences by stringing new wire.

"That's one of the reasons I've hesitated to go ahead and get married," he went on. "Right now this is still his farm. If I bring in a wife and eventually we have a family, little by little he'll feel that he's being pushed into the background, into the chimney corner. I hate to do that to him. On the other hand, RuUt—I can't ask her to wait indefinitely."

"Ruth?" asked Bleys.

Joshua stapled a top strand of wire to the fence post, nodding at the stretcher in Bleys' bands. "Take a strain on that."

Bleys' large hands closed the jaws of the stretcher on the wire, pivoting the tool's head against the fence post to draw the wire taut. Joshua drove a second staple, fastening it with the maximum degree of tightness and, using the puller, lifted the staple he had put in originally. They walked on down to the next post.

"Ruth Mclntyre," Joshua said, "you'd remember her from school here—no, that's right, you didn't go to our local school. In any case she'd have been a little bit older than you and you probably wouldn't have seen much of her. But you must remember the family of the Mclntyres." "Yes," said Bleys, "I do."

He tried to summon up the picture of the Ruth whom Joshua was talking about, but no memory would come. If he had seen her, it would have been on a Sunday, at the time of the church service to which every family went.

"Tell me what she looks like," Bleys said.

"Oh, she's tall, almost as tall as I am, with very black hair and sort of a round face," said Joshua. "I think I love her, Bleys."

"Perhaps you should get married, then, in spite of Uncle Henry. I know if you asked him, he'd be the first to tell you to do that."

"That's why I've got no intention of asking him," said Joshua, "at least not for a while yet."

"Perhaps, I—" Bleys was beginning. Joshua shook his head and stopped him in mid-sentence.

"I'll handle it myself when the time comes," he said.

They talked about the weather, the animals, farm prices and other things. Then, there were other times, in which he found himself working with Henry, usually in construction, since Henry was enlarging the barn that held his herd of goats, intending to add numbers to the herd itself Henry, by contrast, talked about the work and about a number of day-by-day things of merely passing importance. It was nottmtil the third day that he paused after finishing a part of the roofing and, having come down the ladder and wiped his brow, looked squarely at Bleys.

"Will thought a lot of you, Bleys," he said.

"I know," said Bleys, "he told me so." It occurred to him that perhaps this was the ideal time. He reached in his pocket for the letter Will had sent him from Ceta. "He said so in the last letter he wrote me. Would you like to read it?"

"If it's not an intrusion on your private correspondence, or Will's—" Henry said. But his eyes were fixed almost yearningly on the letter.

Bleys passed it over. Henry took it and read it, standing there. Clearly, he read it several times before at last he reverently folded it and held it out once again to Bleys.

"Why don't you keep it?" said Bleys. "This was Will's home and the rest of his things are here. This last letter probably should be with them."

Henry shook his head.

"It was a letter he wrote you," he said. "If you want to keep it, that's your decision."

"Be sure I will," said Bleys, reluctantly taking it. "If you ever change your mind and want it back—"

"No, the matter's settled," said Henry, picking up a new roll of roofing material and beginning to climb the ladder again. Later on that afternoon, however, Joshua managed to get Bleys alone.

"Showing Father that letter," said Joshua, "was the best thing you could have done. He reads it to mean that Will found solace in the Lord before his death. You've no idea how that thought comforts him. Could I also see the letter?"

"Of course!" said Bleys, pulling it out of a pocket and passing it to him. "I should've thought of showing it to you right away. I tried to make your father take it to keep it here; but he wouldn't hear of it."

"I know," said Joshua, reading the letter as hungrily as his father had done, "he told me not to let you give it to me, either."

He interrupted his reading to look up at Bleys.

"But if you're willing to, I'll take it," Joshua said. "Later on, he'll be glad I did, no matter what he says to me about it."

A few hours later, that afternoon, a message came from the store via one of the local people passing by, that Dahno had phoned for Bleys. Bleys took his hovercar down to the store. It was faster than taking the goat-cart, although Henry offered it to him. He reversed the charges and got Dahno on the phone.

"Sorry to interrupt your visit," said Dahno, "but I think it's time I had you here and heard from you about your trip. Have you got transportation?"

"Yes, I rented a hovercar," answered Bleys.

"If you'll come right away then," said Dahno, "we can talk over dinner. Henry and Joshua had to come first, but it's time you and I talked."

CHAPTER 27

Bleys had read an urgency into the phone call from Dahno. But now, sitting in a small, private restaurant with his half-brother, right after having left the farm and Henry and Joshua, the relaxed attitude of Dahno took Bleys back in memory to the days when he used to be brought into Ecumeny on visits.

Dahno was talking about everything under the sun, interesting talk, humorous talk, but about nothing important except the city and some of the goings-on in it; and only a few things that were a matter of business or politics, but none of them particularly important.

Bleys waited.

After they finished the main course of the meal, Dahno ordered and got another drink and sat back in the private quarter circle of padded booth in which they had eaten. Bleys suspected the restaurant of knowing Dahno well and catering to him, for as it also was in the large restaurant where he usually held court nights, the seat and seat-backs offered leg room not only for Dahno, but for himself.