A For Anything

16

As it turned out, the primitives' arrowheads had been poisoned. They had extracted the arrow from the soldier who was hit, without any trouble, but an hour later the fellow died in tetanic convulsions. That offered an opportunity.

They made camp when night fell, on an elevated slope which would be hard to attack without warning. The sky was clear. Dick felt the earth swinging ponderously under him; the air was still fresh with the powdery smell of sage. In the darkness and silence, Dick felt himself paradoxically close to Buckhill. Remembered scenes came vividly into his mind: the green lawns; the early-morning shadows under the stable eaves; the sparkle of sun on the lake. He thought he understood now for the first time how much Buckhill was worth- -- how much his father had willingly paid, and his father before him.

Eagles, by contrast, had a curiously transient quality in his recollections: it was like a tournament field, full of turbulent action, all-important while it lasted. You had to survive, to keep your feet, not as an end hi itself, but because that was the price you paid -- the test of your fitness.

The coal of Lindley's cigarette glowed fiercely, then arced into the night and went out.

"Good night, Jones," he said. "This time tomorrow we'll be home, with feathers in our little caps."

But the poison was already in his body. Dick had switched canteens when they were filled at midday. "This one," Clay had explained, holding up the tiny bottle, "is slow but quiet. You have to allow about four hours, but it's tasteless, colorless, you can put it in anything." In the morning, Lindley was blue in his sleeping bag. In examining the body, Dick contrived to scratch the side of the neck lightly with his ring, and let the soldiers draw their own conclusions from the tiny wound.

They buried him in the hard ground and heaped a cairn over him; and Dick went home to Eagles with lines in his face that had not been there before.

"This is the crucial point," said Melker, with sweat standing on his forehead. The air was stagnant; blue smoke hung wavering over the light. "We have to expand rapidly from a small group to a force capable of taking and holding Eagles: now I say 'rapidly,' because the longer a thing like that goes on, the more the chances add up that somebody will betray us. The safest way to do it is to do it as fast as possible: build the force, strike, and get it over. But when I say 'safest,' now that's relative: we're taking a risk, and a big one."

"Are you suggesting we pull out?" asked Colonel Rosen quietly.

"No!" Melker's forked beard quivered. "No -- that would be sure suicide, because a lapsed conspiracy is no good, has no value to anybody except as material for betrayal, coercion and so on. I want that clearly understood: we're in, we're committed, all of us -- we're going through, whatever happens."

The others looked at him watchfully: Commander Holt, Lady Maxwell, Miss Flavin with her hands primly hi her lap, Dr. Belasco, Collundra, Kishor, and two big men, Cruikshank and Palmer, whom Dick had not met before. It was a select group, the inner circle of the conspiracy, and Dick felt out of place in it: why was he here?

"I also," said Melker, leaning back with a sigh, "wanted to see how many of you I could scare. Fortunately, the answer was none."

Two or three faces showed grim amusement. "We're too old at the game for that, Melker," said the Colonel.

"May be, may be, but I'm a suspicious man. Now it happens that I have some reassuring words to balance the scales. As you're aware, Dick Jones here was sent to eliminate young Lindley: now that was an experiment in more ways than one."

Rosen's interest sharpened. "Yes?"

"Lindley was in line for a key job: we are pulling the necessary strings and it appears that we'll have our man there by tomorrow. Now my feeling was that if there had been any abnormal alertness, anything even so vague as a hunch, then a man like Lindley would be bound to be on his guard. Now then, Dick, tell them how you disposed of Lindley."

Dick said, "I put the poison in my canteen, and made sure I got his when the soldier brought them back."

Melker raised his eyebrows expressively. "You see? The oldest trick in the book."

Commander Holt was shaking his head. "You took a long chance, young man."

"Not at all," said Melker. "Lindley was not abnormally alert, which was what we wanted to know, and we gained some valuable information -- about Jones as well as Lindley." He glanced knowingly at Dick. "Jones, I may say that we would have warned you in advance about that aspect of the matter, if it would have helped you at all."

"I think I understand, mister," said Dick. Curiosity was overcoming his resentment. So far all this was preliminary: what was going to happen next?

"Now," said Melker, folding his hands into a steeple. "We were agreed that it was desirable to make sure of Oliver before the turnover."

"But not about the methods of doing so," put in Collundra.

"No. True." Melker drew a deep breath; his shrewd eyes twinkled. "But I am able to tell you now that we have succeeded in what we regarded as the most desirable but least likely possibility."

The others were leaning forward, excitement showing in then faces. "Have you -- ?" said Belasco.

"We have," Melker said, "obtained the prote of the young lady in question, and have had her duped as one of a routine requisition of servant girls. She is in this suite now. Clay has been preparing him all morning, and when he judges Oliver is ripe for the meeting -- Yes?"

A dark-eyed man in Melker's livery came forward and murmured something in his ear. "Good!" said Melker. "Men and ladies, the time is at hand. If you will gather around the TV, in a few moments you'll see something interesting."

Dick found himself beside Melker as the group re-established itself on the other side of the room. The TV was on, showing a view of one of the small rooms in this same suite; but the room was empty. Judging by the camera angle, the pickup must be hidden in some piece of furniture, perhaps under a table.

Melker grinned up at him with infectious good spirits. "You may possibly find yourself a little bewildered at all this?"

"A little!" said Dick.

"It's a rare story. Perhaps we have just time for me to run over the high spots. Thaddeus Crawford, the man who built Eagles, married a slave girl. It wasn't unusual in those times; the distinctions weren't as rigidly drawn. She bore him a son, sickened and died; however, Thaddeus had taken the precaution of duping her when he first got her: after all, she was a slave."

"But his wife!" said Dick.

"Oh, yes. Certainly. Well, mister, in his later years Thaddeus became somewhat, let us say unusual in his thinking. He grew obsessed by the fear of losing Eagles to upstarts: he wanted to ensure a succession of Thaddeuses. So he prevailed upon his son to marry the dupe of his own wife."

Dick could not repress a start of revulsion.

"Just so; however, you see, technically it wasn't incest -- the dupe was a twenty-year-old girl; his mother had died at the age of twenty-five, fifteen years earlier. Well, mister, he married her and they had a son -- the present Boss of Colorado. And she died. A congenital weakness, apparently. By this time a kind of tradition had been established, you see, and you know what tradition is in a big house; I believe there is even a widespread superstition that no man can hold Eagles who doesn't marry the Bosswife. At any rate, our present Boss Thaddeus II, duped and married her when he was-twenty-four. She had a son the same year -- Oliver -- and died in 2032. The joke is -- " Melker grinned like a gargoyle, putting a skinny hand on Dick's sleeve. "The joke is, genetically the idea is all wrong. Thaddeus's son Edmond had half his mother's genes, naturally. Edmond's son, Thaddeus II, has three-quarters of his mother's genes, and Oliver seven-eights. If this keeps up another few generations, the line will consist of nothing but genes inherited from the mother; not that that wouldn't give a good deal of variation for a while; but poor Thaddeus -- " Melker waved his hand. "He might just have well have mated his wife to his butler."

Dick felt a stiffening of the bodies around him, and Melker's glance flickered away toward the screen.

He turned. In the screen, Oliver and Clay had just walked into the room. Oliver was dressed in white and gold, gaudier than his usual costume; his hair was freshly coiffed and he looked pale. His lips moved, but whatever he said was lost in the rustle of movement.

"Sh!" said Miss Flavin, angrily. The group quieted.

"Wait here just a minute," Clay's voice said. "I'll have her brought in."

He left the room. Oliver glanced around nervously, one hand on the engraved metal stick he wore, the other fidgeting with the lace at his throat. He flung himself down on a divan, stared blankly at a picture on the wall -- one side of it was visible in the screen; it was Frans Hals' "Laughing Cavalier" -- then got up again and began pacing back and forth.

Beside Dick, Melker was breathing stridently. He glanced that way; Melker's eyes were bright, his parted lips moist. "His mother died when he was six," he whispered. "Watch him now: watch him!"

Oliver turned at some sound not audible in the screen. After a moment, there was movement: a person advanced slowly into the room.

Like the rest, Dick strained idiotically to see around the side of the TV screen. In a moment, she moved again: the girl took another hesitant step forward, and stood looking speechlessly at Oliver.

She was dressed in the puff-skirted formal costume that had been popular in Eagles twenty years ago; there was something about the arrangement of her pale blonde hair that was even older. She was slender and awkward, and her long, green eyes gazed at Oliver with a kind of numb astonishment. Her parted lips quivered as if they had forgotten there were such things as words.

Oliver went down slowly on his knees. His arms lifted helplessly. "Oh, Mama!" he said. "Mama Elaine!"