“And our contract specifically gives the United States the right to take action against us in case we endanger the national security,” Karen added. She stuffed her cigarette into the not-too-recently-emptied receiver beside her chair, her blue eyes troubled. “You know, some of us could get shot over this, if we’re not careful. Dunc, does it really have to be one of our own people who—?”
“I don’t see how it could be anybody else,” MacLeod said. “I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but there it is.”
“Well, what are we going to do? Is there nobody whom we can trust?”
“Among the technicians and guards, yes. I could think of a score who are absolutely loyal. But among the Team itself—the top researchers—there’s nobody I’d take a chance on but Kato Sugihara.”
“Can you even be sure of him? I’d hate to think of him as a traitor, but—”
“I have a couple of reasons for eliminating Kato,” MacLeod said. “In the first place, outside nucleonic and binding-force physics, there are only three things he’s interested in. Jitterbugging, hand-painted neckties, and Southern-style cooking. If he went over to the Komintern, he wouldn’t be able to get any of those. Then, he only spends about half his share of the Team’s profits, and turns the rest back into the Team Fund. He has a credit of about a hundred thousand dollars, which he’d lose by leaving us. And then, there’s another thing. Kato’s father was killed on Guadalcanal, in 1942, when he was only five. After that he was brought up in the teachings of Bushido by his grandfather, an old-time samurai. Bushido is open to some criticism, but nobody can show where double-crossing your own gang is good Bushido. And today, Japan is allied with the Western Union, and in any case, he wouldn’t help the Komintern. The Japs’ll forgive Russia for that Mussolini back-stab in 1945 after the Irish start building monuments to Cromwell.”
A light-blue jeep, lettered MacLeod Research Team
in cherry-red, was approaching across the wide concrete apron. MacLeod grinned.
“Here it comes. Fasten your safety belt when you get in; that’s Ahmed driving.”
Karen looked at her watch. “And it’s almost time for dinner. You know, I dread the thought of sitting at the table with the others, and wondering which of them is betraying us.”
“Only nine of us, instead of thirteen, and still one is a Judas,” MacLeod said. “I suppose there’s always a place for Judas, at any table.”
The MacLeod Team dined together, apart from their assistants and technicians and students. This was no snobbish attempt at class-distinction: matters of Team policy were often discussed at the big round table, and the more confidential details of their work. People who have only their knowledge and their ideas to sell are wary about bandying either loosely, and the six men and three women who faced each other across the twelve-foot diameter of the teakwood table had no other stock-in-trade.
They were nine people of nine different nationalities, or they were nine people of the common extra-nationality of science. That Duncan MacLeod, their leader, had grown up in the Transvaal and his wife had been born in the Swedish university town of Upsala was typical not only of their own group but of the hundreds of independent research-teams that had sprung up after the Second World War. The scientist-adventurer may have been born of the relentless struggle for scientific armament supremacy among nations and the competition for improved techniques among industrial corporations during the late 1950s and early ’60s, but he had been begotten when two masses of uranium came together at the top of a steel tower in New Mexico in 1945. And, because scientific research is preeminently a matter of pooling brains and efforts, the independent scientists had banded together into teams whose leaders acquired power greater than that of any condottiere captain of Renaissance Italy.
Duncan MacLeod, sitting outwardly relaxed and merry and secretly watchful and bitterly sad, was such a free-captain of science. One by one, the others had rallied around him, not because he was a greater physicist than they, but because he was a bolder, more clever, less scrupulous adventurer, better able to guide them through the maze of international power-politics and the no less ruthless if less nakedly violent world of Big Industry.
There was his wife, Karen Hilquist, the young metallurgist who, before she was twenty-five, had perfected a new hardening process for S.K.F. and an incredibly tough gun-steel for the Bofors works. In the few minutes since they had returned to Team Center, she had managed to change her coveralls for a skirt and blouse, and do something intriguing with her hair.
And there was Kato Sugihara, looking younger than his twenty-eight years, who had begun to demonstrate the existence of whole orders of structure below the level of nuclear particles.
There was Suzanne Maillard, her gray hair upswept from a face that had never been beautiful but which was alive with something rarer than mere beauty: she possessed, at the brink of fifty, a charm and smartness that many women half her age might have envied, and she knew more about cosmic rays than any other person living.
And Adam Lowiewski, his black mustache contrasting so oddly with his silver hair, frantically scribbling equations on his doodling-pad, as though his racing fingers could never keep pace with his brain, and explaining them, with obvious condescension, to the boyish-looking Japanese beside
