‘Why hasn’t your friend reported the mutinous talk?’
‘Oh, no. Impossible. She’s a daughter of the Martial Arm, Planetary Command. Her loyalty to her comrades-in-arms prevents her.’
‘What about her loyalty to Colonial Administration, Jaafar? Maybe her priorites are badly scrambled.’
‘Aren’t I here? Didn’t she let me come in her place tonight, knowing I would do the necessary?’ Jaafar seemed to think these rhetorical questions settled the matter. ‘It’s time for me to go, sir.’
‘They’d be crazy to try anything so foolish,’ I said to Jaafar’s back. The barrel of his half rifle topped his shoulder like an evil smokestack.
He turned. ‘Some of them, she says, are truly crazy.’ With that he went off halt-footed down the knoll, getting in practice for the partner who believed him temporarily lame. ‘Good night, Dr Benedict.’ The words were partially muffled by a long, warm gust off the veldt. The crinkling epiphytes smoldered in their pit. After watching them a time, I went back into the hangar.
‘Do you believe him?’
‘Do I believe there’s been talk in the barracks of a lynching party, or do I believe they really mean to throw it?’
Elegy made a moue of distaste at my semantic fussiness. ‘The later, of course. Do you really think they’ll do it?’
‘The talk I’m certain of, Elegy – it’s typical barracks talk. But the other’s dicey. Jaafar’s friend is right, though. Some of the Martial Arm’s planetbound E-graders are hotbrows, even with off-duty tranqs, thetrodes, and lorqual to keep ’em cool. They don’t like it here, but they’re indentured for life. If they rev themselves into it, they might risk courts-martial or even a big half-C of Punitive Sleep.’
‘Just to get Bojangles?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Then there’s danger to Kretzoi, too. I wouldn’t trust them to distinguish between an Asadi and an imported replica, especially if it’s dark and they’re all spring-wound like cuckoo clocks.’
‘Do you want to get out of here?’
‘Where would we go? This is the perfect place for the sort of work we’re trying to do, Ben. Why don’t you call Governor Eisen? Tell him what you’ve learned. Surely he’ll send out a special unit to protect both us and the hangar – for at least the next few nights, anyway.’
‘That special unit would probably be partially comprised of some of the very guards who’ve been volleying about the notion of a raid.’
‘Fine. Let ’em know someone in authority knows what they’ve been plotting. That by itself might be enough to keep ’em honest. We’d be stuipid to take the chance their inbarracks bravado isn’t going to spill over into a real working out of their fantasies. There’s too much at stake to hope they’re all just swaggering in their socks, Ben.’
‘If I tell Moses, there’ll be restrictions and punishments among the Komm-service guards and even more resentment of our presence out here.’
Elegy’s So-what? expression was as direct, eloquent, and humbling as a kick in the coccyx. ‘Let ’em resent us. They already do, anyway. What’s a bit more? The restrictions, the punishments – dear God, Ben, it’s only what they deserve for their loose talk and their contemptible disregard of their true duty!’
She crossed the bright interior of the pyramid and sat down by Kretzoi, who was asleep on his cold metal bench. She stroked the big primate’s mane and stared at me angrily.
Everything she had said was straightforward and irrefutable. I descended from the mezzanine, crossed the hangar floor to a glassed-in closet housing a televid unit, and put through a call to Moses’s home.
The Governor heard me out emotionlessly, his face pasty and impassive on the tiny screen. But he promised that within twenty minutes we’d have a six-guard contingent stationed around the hangar. This matter disposed of as if it weren’t in the least extraordinary, Moses asked if we’d made any progress with our ‘trouble-making’ Asadi. To show that his choice of words was intended humorously, he gave a wan smile. I told him that Kretzoi and Bojangles had become fast friends, but didn’t mention the latter’s startling adeptness at picking up Ameslan. Moses nodded amiably, assured me the talk in the barracks would be squelched, along with any conceivable possibility of a raid, and, saying he had a few pointed televid calls to make, almost apologetically broke our connection.
Easy. So easy.
I didn’t begin to feel better about things, though, until, less than twenty minutes later, standing in one of the hangar’s small southside doorways, I saw the headlights of two armored vans boring through the night across the salt-white brightness of the polymac. Civki security police, independent of the military guards who usually stand sentry duty at Chaney Field. Behind them, the pearly lights of the terminal building and the green-glowing panels of its support shacks. Because I didn’t want to talk to the newly assigned police – who would take up their positions whether I greeted them or ducked inhospitably out of view – I closed the door and moved through the hangar securing dead bolts and checking the many other possible points of entry. Then I returned to Elegy and Kretzoi.
‘You were gone quite a time,’ Elegy said.
‘Everything’s taken care of, though. Moses knows what’s happening and we’ve got six laser-toting bodyguards strolling our estate.’
‘Good.’ The annoyance of a possible commando assault behind us, Elegy’s relief was little greater than if we had just replaced a broken skylight through which the rain had been inconveniently falling. ‘I think Kretzoi’s all right,’ she told me. ‘A urine test I administered a few minutes ago shows his blood-sugar levels are back to normal. The work with Bojangles hasn’t exhausted him anything like his time in the Wild.’
‘Tomorrow—’ I began.
‘Tomorrow we’ll let them resume, Ben. During all his time studying the Asadi, Egan Chaney never had a true informant – not even The Bachelor, who probably disclosed as much as he did only out of accident and a happy dim-wittedness. Now, though, we’re developing an informant of our own. At the rate
