Symbol of Terra dot-30 Page 5

  The creed of the Original People-was Chenault one of them? But if he was why had he revealed himself? Or was he throwing out bait to win support and, maybe, more information?

  Dumarest said, "You are confusing legends. As I understand it Earth is supposed to be a world loaded with riches. Rivers of medicinal wine, trees heavy with fruit, hills studded with gems. Find it and you find the wealth of the galaxy."

  "The things left behind," said Chenault. "The goods which had to be left, the installations, the buildings, the facilities, the treasure of knowledge, Earl. Of knowledge. Can you imagine what secrets they must have known? No, there is no conflict. Not when you study it with an open mind. Not when you delve a little beneath the surface. Did you know that Earth has another name?"

  Dumarest nodded. "Terra."

  "Exactly. Now it begins to make sense." Again Chenault intoned the creed. "From terror they fled… Not 'terror,' Earl, but Terra. Terra! They ran from Earth!"

  * * *

  It made sense but words, like figures, could be made to supply a variety of truths. Chenault had chosen his some time ago; despite the timbre of his voice, the deduction wasn't new, and Dumarest remembered the ritual of the blessing, the symbolic gesture and the words intoned, the response.

  He said, "Tayu, Tama, Toetzer, Toyanna, Tyner-how many of you have names beginning with T?"

  "Why?"

  "It's a mistake unless you want to advertise yourselves. Coincidence can be stretched too far. And if you're using it as a means of identification there are better ways."

  "Such as this?" Chenault made the gesture he had made at the table, hands forming a T. "How many would know what it means? Would you? But if I did this?" He drew a T on the table with a finger dipped in ink. At the upper junction he added a circle then, deliberately, quartered it with a cross.

  "The symbol of Earth," said Dumarest. "Of Terra. But I'm not interested in legends. All I want is to get back home."

  "We share the same ambition."

  "You act like a secret society. Why? There is no need."

  "No?" Chenault leaned across the table. "I don't agree. Think about it, Earl. How long have you searched for the coordinates of Earth? How often have you been frustrated? If the planet exists, and you know that it does, why can't it be found?"

  A question Dumarest had pondered too often and still the answers remained the same. It wasn't listed in the almanac and, as all planets were listed, it couldn't exist. The logical answer which refused to recognize its absence of logic. Another, equally vapid: Earth was a legend and who could believe a legendary world was real? And how could an actual world have such a stupid name? Earth was dirt, soil, the stuff you grew crops in. Worlds had proper names or they weren't worlds at all.

  Words to deny the obvious, but men believed in them and not his living, breathing assertion of the truth. To state it was to invite mockery, contempt, arrant disbelief. A weaker man would have been made the butt of cruel jests, one less controlled would have wasted strength in angry combat.

  "A lost world," mused Chenault. "Your world, I mean. You left it, wandered on the ship which carried you and, when you tried to return home you found no one believed it to be real. Well, stranger things have happened. I remember one time when-" He broke off, one hand lifting to his chest.

  "Something wrong?"

  "No. Give me a moment." Chenault lowered his head as if to hide his face and eyes. Time during which Dumarest sat listening, his face impassive, his eyes half-closed. "Forgive me."

  Chenault straightened in his chair. "The penalty of age."

  "You want me to get something? Water? Wine? Some brandy?"

  "No."

  "A doctor?"

  "No. I'll be-" Again the hand lifted as Chenault almost slumped to the table. Dumarest rose, touched his shoulder, the exposed column of the throat. "No!" Chenault twisted. "Leave me. Get-" His voice faded. "Tell her I need her. Hurry!"

  "Who?"

  "Pia. Pia. Tell her."

  Dumarest left the room, almost running, reaching the dining room, a chamber holding musical instruments, another set with gaming tables. Vosper sat dealing himself a hand.

  "Chenault's ill. He wants the woman, Toyanna. Where can I find her?"

  "The laboratory or in her room on the first floor but-" He shrugged as Dumarest moved away, concentrating on his cards.

  Pia Toyanna was halfway down the stairs when Dumarest found her. She wore a simple gown, green edged with black, belted snug to her slender waist. She carried no satchel and her hands were empty. She listened to Dumarest with an air of impatience.

  "Yes. Yes, I understand." She nodded dismissal. "Just leave this to me."

  "Do you need help?" Chenault was a big man. "If he needs to be moved you could have trouble."

  "I can manage." She faced him, eyes and voice determined. "You've done all you can do. Now please leave things to me."

  Dumarest watched her go, following her as she headed to where he had left Chenault, frowning when she moved on to a door lower down the passage. As he made to follow a figure stepped before him. Baglioni, small but determined, lifted his left hand. The dart gun in the other glimmered with reflected light.

  "This area is restricted, sir. Please do not force me to use this against you." The dart gun lifted in his hand.

  Dumarest said, "Do you think it would stop me?"

  "I'm certain of it." The midget remained calm. "It fires a spray with a cover four feet in diameter at a distance of as many yards. I shall fire as soon as you lessen that distance. One dart must surely hit your face and one will be enough to knock you out. To cost you an eye, perhaps, if you should be unlucky. Personally I wouldn't care to gamble on the odds."

  Too high against him but not for Dumarest. He knew he could close the distance between them and reach the man before he could fire. But to do it would reveal his speed and make an enemy and all to no purpose. Chenault had the right to act as he chose within his own house.

  Casually Dumarest said, "I wouldn't either. Will Tama be all right?"

  "He will receive the best of attention, sir. That I assure you. You need have no concern. Now, if you would care to return to the dining room, refreshments have been served."

  Cakes and sandwiches and drinks of various types together with a collection of condiments.

  Vosper, selecting a cake, sprinkled it with an aromatic red powder and tasted it with the tip of his tongue.

  "Too sweet." He added more powder. "You shouldn't have been in such a hurry, Earl. I could have saved you that run-in with Baglioni. And Toyanna knew she was needed."

  "Why didn't she go directly to Chenault?"

  "Didn't she?" Vosper shrugged. "Maybe she went to get her medical kit. She couldn't have done much for Tama without one." He tasted the cake again, nodded his satisfaction, and began to eat. "Care for a game? Anything you like as long as it's for real money. I lose interest when playing for fun. Your choice; Starsmash, Spectrum, High, Low, man-in-between. You name it."

  "Poker?"

  "Sure." Vosper beamed. "My favorite." Finishing his cake he glanced toward the gaming room. "Want to eat or shall we get at it?"

  "You sound like a shark," said Dumarest. "Are you?"

  "No."

  "A telepath? How did you know about my run-in with the midget?"

  "A shrewd guess. When Tama's in trouble Baglioni comes running to protect him. It happens every time." Vosper laughed. "A telepath. I wish to hell I was. I'm just an engineer."

  Chapter Five

  Like a mouse the nurse moved down the corridor and into the room where Avro lay like a corpse on the bed. A routine visit; monitors did a good job and normally were trusted but this was a special patient and Doctor Kooga had made it plain that any failure would bring harsh penalties.

  Quietly she stepped to the side of the bed, looking at the flaccid, skull-like face, one seeming more dead than alive, yet the monitors registered the beating of the heart, the passage of oxygenated blood through the brain. Only one
thing seemed out of place: a tiny, flickering lamp on the panel of the encephalograph, the signal of high current demand. Nothing to worry about, activity of the recording pens always registered above a certain level, but this was unusual in terms of duration.

  The cyber's mental faculties were working at high pressure and she wondered why. He should be comatose, drifting in a mindless lethargy, thoughts at a low ebb. Instead his mind seemed to be acting like a dynamo.

  Leaning over the inert form she gently touched his face. A gesture without the intention of a caress; part of her duties was to administer drops in each eye. A thing done with practiced skill and she wiped the surplus from the waxen cheeks, trying not to think of the orbs she had seen, the spark which seemed to glow in their depths. The reflection of light, she guessed, it had to be that. The cyber was drugged, asleep, resting like the dead man he would soon be unless things took a turn for the better.

  Even so she tiptoed quietly from the room when she left.

  Avro didn't register her going. He floated in a void shot through with swaths of warmly glowing colors illuminating shapes of unusual proportions. Vistas which rolled endlessly through the chambers of his mind. Stored impressions, memories, speculations, all now released to flood his questing awareness, but confined to the limits of his brain.

  A foretaste of what would be when his cortex had been removed from his body and sealed in a vat to become a part of the tremendous complex which was Central Intelligence. There he would become one with the gestalt which directed the Cyclan, using cybers and agents to spread the dominance of the organization until, in the end, it would rule the entire galaxy.

  A concept which yielded mental pleasure and he swam in a sea of ceaseless attainment during which problems were solved, new worlds based on unusual chemical combinations created, new frames of reference established to bring into being new and exciting universes.

  A time of euphoria which faded as the colors dulled and the vast shapes diminished to form a rocky plain on which stood a solitary figure. One clad in the scarlet robe he knew so well, the breast glimmering with the Seal of the Cyclan.

  Marie? Had the Cyber Prime come to visit him in his vision? A companion? Someone he had previously known? Avro strained his eyes but could make out no detail; the drawn cowl masked the figure's face.

  "Master?"

  His words died without acknowledgment but he was not surprised. The vision matched others he had experienced before; illusions born of his distorted mind. The Homochon elements grafted within his brain were now growing like a cancer running wild. Normally, when activated, they established rapport with Central Intelligence, placing him in direct mental communication with the great complex. An organic communication which was almost instantaneous. But, illusion though it seemed, this too could be the product of rapport.

  He said, "Who are you? Am I to be interrogated?"

  Sound which did not exist beyond his enclosed world, just as the movement he made as he stepped toward the figure had no reality but in his mind.

  "You failed," said the cowled figure. "You failed."

  Not once but twice and Avro felt the shame of inadequacy even as he admitted the truth.

  "I admit it," he said. "I failed. But it was not wholly my fault. The affliction I now suffer struck me down. I had Dumarest in my hand, safe, captured, but I collapsed at the wrong moment. Even so he should have been held. The arrangements had been made. Those with me should have taken him." In memory he was again the sight over the falls; the rafts almost touching, the flames, the bodies falling and Dumarest rising like a bird into the sky. "Luck," he said. "I knew of his luck but thought I'd taken every precaution. I made a mistake, one, but it was enough. Who could have known I would be stricken down when I was?"

  "You had the data. You knew of your condition."

  "Yes."

  "You should have predicted the logical outcome."

  "I did. But there was time."

  "Time is a variable."

  "A trait accounted for. The probability of my staying active and successfully completing the capture was 98.5 percent. Almost certainty."

  But it nor any other prediction could ever be that. Always there remained the unknown factor which, as had happened, could negate the highest probability. A factor which seemed to act to Dumarest's advantage with consistent regularity.

  "Even so you failed. A proof of your inefficiency. Can you deny that you merit the penalty of failure?"

  Avro felt the cold chill of what was to come. A cyber did not fail. If he did not succeed then he ceased to be a cyber. The reward for which he had dedicated his life was denied him. Instead he was given total extinction.

  And the colors would be gone, the shapes, the endless drifting in a void thronged with mental attainment. There would be no created worlds, no new universes, no communion with others of his kind. No near-immortality in which to plan domination and guide the Cyclan to the fulfillment of the master plan.

  "No," he said. "I have not failed. Not yet."

  "Then where is Dumarest? The secret of the affinity twin which he holds still eludes us. We must recover the sequence in which the fifteen biomolecular units must be assembled."

  Avro said, "To repeat the obvious demonstrates a lack of efficiency. I am aware of the need to obtain the secret."

  One which would give the Cyclan total domination over all others. By its use one intelligence could take over the body of another. Become that other, using the host as it willed, defying all barriers of time and space. Each cyber could control a ruler and the brains making up Central Intelligence could experience bodily life again and rid the Cyclan of the fear that they hovered on the brink of insanity.

  "He must be found," said the figure. "Where is he? What happened in the main salon of the apartment by the falls. What happened?"

  "Dumarest killed and escaped," said Avro. "Killed the man who had killed." He couldn't think of names but the incident was clear.

  "Where is Dumarest?"

  "Gone." Rising into the featureless sky on a trail of flame. "Gone."

  "Where is Dumarest?"

  A problem to be answered; find the man and find the secret and, at the same time, prove his efficiency, his right to his reward. Avro examined the evidence, the smattering of facts he had gleaned as to what Dumarest had done since his arrival on Lychen. The people he had met and the interests he had shown. Data which be incorporated into a web of other facts, isolating, evaluating, arriving at a logical conclusion.

  "Where is Dumarest?"

  A question answered then ignored despite repeated demands as he concentrated on the figure standing on the rocky plain before him. A simulacrum created by Central Intelligence? A novel means of rapport? Something special to himself or was the whole thing a fantasy?

  "Who are you?" he demanded. "Show me your face."

  He watched as a hand rose to throw back the cowl. He felt no surprise; logic had told him who and what the figure must be and he stood, in the world of his mind, looking at the accuser who was himself.

  * * *

  Vosper said, "Open for five. Jem?"

  Toetzer took his time, pursing his lips as he studied his cards, the middle finger of his left hand flicking the pasteboards. A habit Dumarest had noticed since the man had joined the game hours ago. As he had noticed others from those who had joined the school.

  "Call and raise ten."

  Toetzer wasn't bluffing. He played with mathematical skill; paying strict attention to the odds, assessing the worth of each hand, the potential of each draw. Massak was different, using guile to mask his real intent.

  "I'll just lift that another five."

  A killer waiting to strike. To use the power of his money to crush the opposition as he would use the strength of his body to destroy an enemy. Shior matched him but in a more subtle fashion. A rapier as compared to a club smiling as he, too, lifted the raise by an equal amount. A ploy to test the opposition, buying the right to act in his own manner, one akin to Massak's b
ut not so blatantly obvious. A man who would appear to be a reckless fool-and who would take those who thought so for all they had when the time was ripe.

  "Earl?" Vosper looked to where he sat. "You in?"

  Dumarest shook his head, following the instinct which told him to fold his hand. Lopakhin joined him, grunting when Vosper met the raise and doubled it.

  "Here it comes. The hammer. The trouble with Ron is he's greedy."

  But too engrossed in his own hand to pay due attention to the others. Dumarest sat back in his chair, looking, listening. The players had gathered as Vosper had said they might and, as was the habit of men playing cards, they talked. Small talk, banter, jests, idle remarks but, from such talk information could be gained. Dumarest had made the most of the opportunity.

  Vosper was an engineer, Toetzer a mathematician, Massak a mercenary, Shior a fighter, Lopakhin, aside from an artist, was also a communications expert. Grain garnered from chaff and Dumarest added it to other facts. Toyanna a skilled doctor, Hilary a sensitive, Govinda?

  He felt the touch on his shoulder as Massak, laughing, scooped up his winnings. The woman stood beside him, hair a scarlet aureole, her face smooth, her eyes luminous.

  Vosper glanced at her and shook his head. Toetzer, cards in hand, paused as he was about to deal.

  "No offense, Earl, but if Govinda stays then I'm quitting the game."

  "You think she's helping me to cheat?"

  "No, nothing like that, it's just that-" Toetzer broke off, then appealed to the others. "How can I explain? Can any of you tell him?"

  "She reminds him of his mother," said Vosper. "The one who-"

  "Not my mother!" Toetzer was harsh. "The bitch who bought me. Who defiled me. Who- The hell with it. She stays I go." He slammed down the cards. "What's it to be?"

  "I'll go," said Govinda. Stooping, she whispered in Dumarest's ear. "I just wanted to be close to you. To ask if I'll see you again later. We could go for a walk or something."

  "Yes," he said. "Later."