Sense of Obligation

that you are trying to cover up something. For Occam's sake be specific! Bring together two of these hypothetical individuals and tell me what happens.'

Brion took a deep breath. He was in over his head and far from shore. 'Well—take a bachelor like myself. Since I like cross-country skiing I make my home in this big house our family has, right at the edge of the Broken Hills. In summer I looked after a drumtum herd, but after slaughtering my time was my own all winter. I did a lot of skiing, and used to work for the Twenties. Sometimes I would go visiting. Then again, people would drop in on me —houses are few and far between on Anvhar. We don't even have locks on our front doors. You accept and give hospitality without qualification. Whoever comes. Male—female—in groups or just traveling alone—'

'I get the drift. Life must be dull for a single girl on your iceberg planet, she must surely have to stay home a lot.'

'Only if she wants to. Otherwise she can go wherever she wishes and be welcomed as another individual. I suppose it is out of fashion in the rest of the galaxy—and would probably raise a big laugh on Earth—but a platonic, disinterested friendship between man and woman is an accepted thing on Anvhar.'

'Sounds exceedingly dull. If you are all such cool and distant friends, what keeps your birthrate going?'

Brion felt his ears flushing, not quite sure if he was being teased or not. 'There are plenty of happy marriages. But it is up to the woman always to indicate if she is interested in a man. A girl who isn't interested won't get any proposals. I imagine this is a lot different from other planets—but so is our world. The system works well enough for us.'

'Just about the opposite of Earth,' Lea told him, dropping the apple core into a dish and carefully licking the tips of her fingers. 'I guess you Anvharians would describe Earth as a planetary hotbed of sin. The reverse of your system, and going full blast all the time. There are far too many people there for comfort. Birth control came late and is still being fought—if you can possibly imagine that. There are just too many crack-brained ideas that have been long entrenched in custom. The world's overcrowded. Men, women, children, a boiling mob wherever you look. And all of the physically mature ones seem to be involved in the Great Game of Love. The male is always the aggressor, and women take the most outrageous kinds of flattery for granted. At parties these are always a couple of hot breaths of passion fanning your neck. A girl has to keep her spike heels filed sharp.'

'She has to what—?'

'A figure of speech, Brion. Meaning you fight back all the time, if you don't want to be washed under by the flood.'

'Sounds rather'—Brion weighed the word before he said it, but could find none other suitable —'repellent.'

'From your point of view, it would be. I'm afraid we get so used to it that we even take it for granted. Sociologically speaking—' She stopped and looked at Brion's straight back and almost rigid posture. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened in an unspoken oh of sudden realization.

'I'm being a fool,' she said. 'You weren't speaking generally at all! You had a very specific subject in mind. Namely me!'

'Please, Lea, you must understand—'

'But I do!' she laughed. 'All the time I thought you were being a frigid and hard-hearted lump of ice, you were really being very sweet. Just playing the game in good old Anvharian style. Waiting for a sign from me. We'd still be playing by different rules if you hadn't had more sense than I, and finally realized that somewhere along the line we must have got our signals mixed. And I thought you were some kind of frosty offworld celibate.' She let her hand go out and her fingers rustled through his hair. Something she had been wanting to do for a long time.

'I had to,' he said, trying to ignore the light touch of her fingers. 'Because I thought so much of you, I couldn't have done anything to insult you. Until I began to worry where the insult would lie, since I knew nothing about your planet's mores.'

'Well you know now,' she said very softly. 'The men aggress. Now that I understand, I think I like your way better. But I'm still not sure of all the rules. Do I explain that yes, Brion, I like you so very much? You are more man, in one great big wide shouldered lump, than I have ever met before—'

His arms were around her, holding her to him, and their lips sought each other's in the darkness. 

XIII

'He wouldn't come in, sir. Just hammered on the door and said, I'm here, tell Brandd.'

'Good enough,' Brion said, seating his gun in the holster and sliding the extra clips into his pocket. 'I'm going out now, and I should return before dawn. Get one of the wheeled stretchers down here from the hospital. I'll want it waiting when I get back.'

Outside the street was darker than he remembered. Brion frowned and his hand moved towards his gun. Someone had put all the nearby lights out of commission. There was just enough illumination from the stars to enable him to make out the dark bulk of a sandcar.

The motor roared as soon as he had closed the door. Without lights the sandcar churned a path through the city and out into the desert. Though the speed picked up, the driver still drove in the dark, feeling his way with a light touch on the controls. The ground rose, and when they reached the top of a flat mesa he killed the engine. Neither the driver nor Brion had spoken a word since they left.

A switch snapped and the instrument lights came on. In their dim glow Brion could just make out the other man's hawklike profile. When he moved Brion saw that his figure was cruelly shortened. Either accident or a mutated gene had warped his spine, hunching him forward in eternally bent supplication. Warped bodies are rare— his was the first Brion had ever seen. He wondered what series of events had kept him from medical attention all his life. This might explain the bitterness and pain in the man's voice.

'Did the mighty brains on Nyjord bother to tell you that they have chopped another day off the deadline? That this world is about to come to an end?'

'Yes, I know,' Brion said. 'That's why I'm asking your group for help. Our time is running out too fast.'

The man didn't answer, merely grunted and gave his full attention to the radar pings and glowing screen. The electronic senses reached out as he made a check on all the search frequencies to see if they were being followed.

'Where are we going?' Brion asked.

'Out into the desert,' the driver made a vague wave of his hand. 'Headquarters of the army. Since the whole thing will be blown up in another day, I guess I can tell you it's the only camp we have. All the cars, men and weapons are based there. And Hys. He's the man in charge. Tomorrow it will be all gone—along with this cursed planet. What's your business with us?'

'Shouldn't I be telling Hys that?'

'Suit yourself.' Satisfied with the instrument search the driver kicked the car to life again and churned on across the desert. 'But we're a volunteer army and we have no secrets from each other. Just from the fools at home who are going to kill this world.' There was a bitterness in his words that he made no attempt to conceal. 'They fought among themselves and put off a firm decision so long that now they are forced to commit murder.'

'From what I had heard, I thought that it was the other way around. They call your Nyjord Army terrorists.'

'We are. Because we are an army and we're at war. The idealists at home only understood that when it was too late. If they had backed us in the beginning, we would have blown open every black castle on Dis—searched until we found those bombs. But that would have meant wanton destruction and death. They wouldn't consider that. Now they are going to kill everyone, destroy everything.' He flicked on the panel lights just long enough to take a compass bearing, and Brion saw the tortured unhappiness in his twisted body.

'It's not over yet,' Brion said. 'There is more than a day left, and I think I'm onto something that might stop the war—without any bombs being dropped.'