"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 him
self from this and looked directl
y 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 th
e two oi* them went out. "But I’l
l 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 wou
ld exhaust itself in a much short
er 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 w
e really are in a position of str
ength; 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."