SOLDIER, ASK NOT
By
Gordon R. Dickson
Soldier, ask not—now, or ever, Where to war your banners go...

I
As I got off the spaceliner on St. Marie, the little breeze from the higher pressure of the ship’s atmosphere at my back was like a hand from the darkness behind me, shoving me into the dark day and the rain. My Newsman’s cloak covered me. The wet chill of the day wrapped around me but did not enter me. I was like the naked claymore of my own early ancestors, wrapped and hidden in the plaid-sharpened on a stone—and carried now at last to the meeting for which it had been guarded over three years of waiting.
A meeting in the cold rain of spring. I felt it, cold as old blood on my hands and tasteless on my lips. Above, the sky was low and clouds flowing to the east. The rain fell steadily.
The sound of it was like a rolling of drums as I went down the outside landing stairs, the multitude of raindrops sounding their own end against the unyielding concrete all around. The concrete stretched far from the ship in every direction, hiding the earth, as bare and clean as the last page of an account book before the final entry. At its far edge, the spaceport terminal stood like a single gravestone. The curtains of falling water between it and me thinned and thickened like the smoke of battle, but could not hide it entirely from my sight.
It was the same rain that falls in all places and on all worlds. It had fallen like this on Athens of Old Earth, when I was only a boy, on the dark, unhappy house of the uncle who brought me up after my parent’s death, on the ruins of the Parthenon as I saw it from my bedroom window.
I listened to it now as I went down the landing stairs, drumming on the great ship behind me which had shifted me free between the stars —from Old Earth to this second smallest of the worlds, this small terra-formed planet under the Procyon suns—and drumming hollowly upon the Credentials case sliding down the conveyor belt beside me. That case now meant nothing to me—neither my papers or the Credentials of Impartiality I had carried six years and worked so long to earn. Now I thought less of these than of the name of the man I should find dispatching groundcars at the edge of the field. If, that was, he was actually the man my Earth informants had named to me. And if they had not lied…
“… Your luggage, sir?”

I woke from my thoughts and the rain. I had reached the concrete. The debarking officer smiled at me. He was older than I, though he looked younger. As he smiled some beads of moisture broke and spilled like tears from the brown visor-edge of his cap onto the tally sheet he held.
“Send it to the Friendly compound,” I said. “I’ll take the Credentials case.
I took it up from the conveyor belt and turned to walk off. The man standing in a dispatcher’s uniform by the first groundcar in line did fit the description.
“Name, sir?” he said. “Business on St. Marie?”
If he had been described to me, I must have been described to him. But I was prepared to humor him.
“Tam Olyn,” I said. “Old Earth resident and Interworld News Network representative. I’m here to cover the Friendly-Exotic conflict.” I opened my case and gave him my papers.
“Fine, Mr. Olyn.” He handed them back to me, damp from the rain. He turned away to open the door of the car beside him and set the automatic pilot. “Follow the highway straight to Joseph’s Town. Put it on automatic at the city limits and the car’ll take you to the Friendly compound.”
“All right,” I said. “Just a minute.”
He turned back. He had a young, good-looking face with a little mustache and he looked at me with a bright blankness. “Sir?”
“Help me get in the car.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir.” He came quickly over to me. “I didn’t realize your leg—”
“Damp stiffens it,” I said. He adjusted the seat and I got my left leg in behind the steering column. He started to turn away.
“Wait a minute,” I said again. I was out of patience. “You’re Walter Imera, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” he said softly.
“Look at me,” I said. “You’ve got some information for me, haven’t you?”
He turned slowly back to face me. His face was still blank.
“No, sir.”
I waited a long moment, looking at him.
“All right,” I said then, reaching for the car door. “I guess you know I’ll get the information anyway. And they’ll believe you told me.”
His little mustache began to look like it was painted on.
“Wait-” he said.
“What for?”
“Look,” he said, “you’ve got to understand. Information like that’s not part of your news, is it? I’ve got a family—”
“And I haven’t,” I said. I felt nothing for him.
“But you don’t understand. They’d kill me. That’s the sort of organization the Blue Front is now, here on St. Marie. What d’you want to know about them for? I didn’t understand you meant—”
“All right,” I said. I reached for the car door.
“Wait—” He held out a hand to me in the rain. “How do I know you can make them leave me alone if I tell you?”
“They may be back in power here some day,” I said. “Not even outlawed political groups want to antagonize the Interplanetary News Network.” I started to close the door once more.
“All right—” he said quickly. “All right. You go to New San Marcos. The Wallace Street Jewelers there. It’s just beyond Joseph’s Town, where the Friendly compound is you’re going to.” He licked his lips. “You’ll tell them about me?”
“I’ll tell them.” I looked at him. Above the edge of the blue uniform collar on the right side of his neck I could see an inch or two of fine silver chain, bright against winter-pale skin. The crucifix attached to it would be down under his shirt. “The Friendly soldiers have been here two years now. How do people like them?”
He grinned a little. His color was coming back.
“Oh, like anybody,” he said. “You just have to understand them. They’ve got their own ways.”
I felt the ache in my stiff leg where the doctors on New Earth had taken the needle from the spring rifle out of it three years before.
“Yes, they have,” I said. “Shut the door.”
He shut it. I drove off.
There was a St. Christopher’s medal on the car’s instrument panel. One of the Friendly soldiers would have ripped it off and thrown it away, or refused the car. And so it gave me a particular pleasure to leave it where it was, though it meant no more to me than it would to him. It was, not just because of Dave, my brother-in-law, and the other prisoners they had shot down on New Earth. It was simply because there are some duties that have a small element of pleasure. After the illusions of childhood are gone and there is nothing left but duties, such pleasures are welcome. Fanatics, when all is said and done, are no worse than mad dogs.
But mad dogs have to be destroyed; it is a simple common sense. And you return to common sense after a while in life, inevitably. When the wild dreams of justice and progress are all dead and buried, when the painful beatings of feeling inside you are finally stilled, then it becomes best to be still, unliving, and unyielding as—the blade of a sword sharpened on a stone. The rain through which such a blade is carried to its using does not stain it, any more than the blood in which it is bathed at last. Rain and blood are alike to sharpened iron.
I drove for half an hour past wooded hills and plowed meadows. The furrows of the fields were black in the rain. I thought it a kinder black than some other shades I had seen; and at last I reached the outskirts of Joseph’s Town.
The autopilot of the car threaded me through a small, neat, typical St. Marie City of about a hundred thousand people. We came out on the far side into a cleared area, beyond which lifted the massive, sloping concrete walls of a military compound.
A Friendly non-com stopped my car at the gate with his black spring rifle, and opened the car door at my left. “Thee have business here?”
His voice was harsh and high in his nose. The cloth tabs of a group-man edged his collar. Above them his forty-year-old face was lean and graven with lines. Both face and hands, the only uncovered parts of him, looked unnaturally white against the black cloth and rifle. I opened the case beside me and handed him my papers. “My Credentials,” I said. “I’m here to see your acting Commander of Expeditionary Forces, Commandant Jamethon Black.”
“Move over, then,” he said nasally. “I must drive thee.” I moved.
He got in and took the stick. We drove through the gate and turned down an approach alley. I could see an interior square at the alley’s far end. The close concrete walls on either side of us echoed the sound of our passage as we went. I heard drill commands growing louder as we approached the square. When we rolled out into it, soldiers were drawn up in ranks for their midday service, in the rain.
The groupman left me and went in the entrance of what seemed to be an office inset in the wall on one side of the square. I looked over the soldiers standing in formation. They stood at present-arms, their position of worship under field conditions; and as I watched, the officer standing facing them, with his back to a wall, led them into the words of their Battle Hymn.
Soldier, ask not—now, or ever, 
Where to war your banners go.
Anarch’s legions all surround us.
Strike! And do not count the blow!
I sat trying not to listen. There was no musical accompaniment, no religious furniture or symbols except the thin shape of the cross whitewashed on the gray wall behind the officer. The massed male voices rose and fell slowly in the dark, sad hymn that promised them only pain, and suffering, and sorrow. At last, the final line mourned its harsh prayer for a battle death, and they ordered arms.
A groupman dismissed the ranks as the officer walked back past my car without looking at me, and passed in through the entrance where my non-commissioned guide had disappeared. As he passed I saw the officer was young.
A moment later the guide came for me. Limping a little on my stiffened leg, I followed him to an inner room with the lights on above a single desk. The young officer rose and nodded as the door closed behind me. He wore the faded tabs of a commandant on his uniform lapels.
As I handed my credentials across the desk to him, the glare of the light over the desk came full in my eyes, blinding me. I stepped back and blinked at his blurred face. As it came back into focus I saw it for a moment as if it was older, harsher, twisted and engraved with the lines of years of fanaticism.
Then my eyes refocused completely, and I saw him as he actually was. Dark-faced, but thin with the thinness of youth rather than that of self-starvation. He was not the face burned in my memory. His features were regular to the point of being handsome, his eyes tired and shadowed; and I saw the straight, weary line of his mouth above the still, self-controlled stiffness of his body, smaller and slighter than mine.
He held the credentials without looking at them. His mouth quirked a little, dryly and wearily, at the corners. “And no doubt, Mr. Olyn,” he said, “you’ve got another pocket filled with authorities from the Exotic Worlds to interview the mercenary soldiers and officers they’ve hired from the Dorsai and a dozen other worlds to oppose God’s Chosen in War?”
I smiled. Because it was good to find him as strong as that, to add to my pleasure of breaking him.
II
I looked across the ten feet or so of distance that separated us. The Friendly non-com who had killed the prisoners on New Earth had also spoken of God’s Chosen.
“If you’ll look under the papers directed to you,” I said, “you’ll find them. The News Network and its people are impartial. We don’t take sides.”
“Right,” said the dark young face opposing me, “take sides.”
“Yes, Commandant,” I said. “That’s right. Only sometimes it’s a matter of debate where Right is. You and your troops here now are invaders on the world of a planetary system your ancestors never colonized. And opposing you are mercenary troops hired by two worlds that not only belong under the Procyon suns but have a commitment to defend the smaller worlds of their system—of which St. Marie is one. I’m not sure right is on your side.”
He shook his head slightly and said, “We expect small understanding from those not Chosen.” He transferred his gaze from me to the papers in his hand.
“Mind if I sit down?” I said. “I’ve got a bad leg.”
“By all means.” He nodded to a chair beside his desk and, as I sat down, seated himself. I looked across the papers on the desk before him and saw, standing to one side, the solidograph of one of the window-less high-peaked churches the Friendlies build. It was a legitimate token for him to own—but there just happened to be three people, an older man and woman and a young girl of about fourteen, in the foreground of the image. All three of them bore a family resemblance to Jamethon Black. Glancing up from my credentials he saw me looking at them; and his gaze shifted momentarily to the graph and away again, as if he would protect it.
“I’m required, I see,” he said, drawing my eyes back to him, “to provide you with cooperation and facilities. We’ll find quarters for you here. Do you need a car and driver?”
“Thanks,” I said. “That commercial car outside will do. And I’ll manage my own driving.”

“As you like.” He detached the papers directed to him, passed the rest back to me and leaned toward a grill in his desktop. “Groupman.”
“Sir,” the grill answered promptly.
“Quarters for a single male civilian. Parking assignment for a civilian vehicle, personnel.”
“Sir.”
The voice from the grill clicked off. Jamethon Black looked across his desk at me. I got the idea he was waiting for my departure.
“Commandant,” I said, putting my credentials back in their case, “two years ago your Elders of the United Churches on Harmony and Association found the planetary government of St. Marie in default of certain disputed balances of credit, so they sent an expedition in here to occupy and enforce payment. Of that expedition, how much in the way of men and equipment do you have left?”
“That, Mr. Olyn,” he said, “is restricted military information.”
“However”—and I closed the case—“you, with the regular rank of commandant, are acting Commander of Forces for that remnant of your expedition. That position calls for someone about five ranks higher than you. Do you expect such an officer to arrive and take charge?”
“I’m afraid you’d have to ask that question of Headquarters on Harmony, Mr. Olyn.”
“Do you expect reinforcements of personnel and more supplies?”
“If I did”—his voice was level—“I would have to consider that restricted information, too.”
“You know that it’s been pretty widely mentioned that your General Staff on Harmony has decided that this expedition to St. Marie is a lost cause? But that to avoid loss of face they prefer you here to be cut up, instead of withdrawing you and your men.”
“I see,” he said.
“You wouldn’t care to comment?”
His dark, young, expressionless face did not change. “Not in the case of rumors, Mr. Olyn.”
“One last question then. Do you plan to retreat westward, or surrender when the spring offensive of the Exotic mercenary forces begins to move against you?”
“The Chosen in War never retreat,” he said. “Neither do they abandon, or suffer abandonment by, their Brothers in the Lord.” He stood up. “I have work I must get back to, Mr. Olyn.”
I stood up, too. I was taller than he was, older, and heavier-boned. It was only his almost unnatural composure that enabled him to maintain his appearance of being my equal or better.
“I’ll talk to you later, perhaps, when you’ve got more time,” I said.
“Certainly.” I heard the office door open behind me. “Groupman,” he said, speaking past me, “take care of Mr. Olyn.”

The groupman he had turned me over to found me a small concrete cubicle with a single high window, a camp bed and a uniform cabinet. He left me for a moment and returned with a signed pass.
“Thanks,” I said as I took it. “Where do I find the Headquarters of the Exotic Forces?”
“Our latest advice, sir,” he said, “is that they’re ninety kilometers east of here. New San Marcos.” He was my height, but, like most of them, half a dozen years younger than I, with an innocence that contrasted with the strange air of control they all had.
“San Marcos.” I looked at him. “I suppose you enlisted men know your General Headquarters on Harmony has decided against wasting replacements for you?”
“No, sir,” he said. I might have commented on the rain for all the reaction he showed. Even these boys were still strong and unbroken. “Is there somewhat else?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks.”
He went out. And I went out, to get in my car and head ninety kilometers east through the same sort of country to New San Marcos. I reached it in about three-quarters of an hour. But I did not go directly to find the Exotic Field Headquarters. I had other fish to fry.
These took me to the Wallace Street Jewelers. There, three shallow steps down from street level and an opaqued door let me in to a long, dim-lighted room filled with glass cases. There was a small elderly man at the back of the store behind the final case and I saw him eyeing my correspondent’s cloak and badge as I got closer.
“Sir?” he said, as I stopped across the case from him. He raised gray, narrow old eyes in a strangely smooth face to look at me.
“I think you know what I represent,” I said. “All worlds know the News Services. We’re not concerned with local politics.”
“Sir?”
“You’ll find out how I learned your address anyway.” I kept on smiling at him. “So I’ll tell you it was from a spaceport auto-dispatcher named Imera. I promised him protection for telling me. We’d appreciate it if he remains well and whole.”
“I’m afraid—” He put his hands on the glass top of the case. They were veined with the years. “You wanted to buy something?”
“I’m willing to pay in good will,” I said, “for information.”
His hands slid off the countertop.
“Sir.” He sighed a little. “I’m afraid you’re in the wrong store.”
“I’m sure I am,” I said. “But your store’ll have to do. We’ll pretend it’s the right store and I’m talking to someone who’s a member of the Blue Front.”
He shook his head slowly and stepped back from the case.
“The Blue Front is illegal,” he said. “Good-by, sir.”
“In a moment. I’ve got a few things to say first.”
“Then I’m sorry.” He retreated toward some drapes covering a doorway. “I can’t listen. No one will come into this room with you, sir, as long as you talk like that.”
He slipped through the drapes and was gone. I looked around the long, empty room.
“Well,” I said, a little more loudly, “I guess I’ll have to speak to the walls. I’m sure the walls can hear me.”
I paused. There was no sound.
“All right,” I said. “I’m a correspondent. All I’m interested in is information. Our assessment of the military situation here on St. Marie” —and here I told the truth—“shows the Friendly Expeditionary Forces abandoned by their home headquarters and certain to be overrun by the Exotic Forces as soon as the ground dries enough for heavy equipment to move.”
There was still no answer, but the back of my neck knew they were listening, and watching me.
“As a result,” I went on—and here I lied, though they would have no way of knowing—“we consider it inevitable that the Friendly Command here will have got in contact with the Blue Front. Assassination of enemy commanders is expressly in violation of the Mercenaries’ Code and the Articles of Civilized Warfare—but civilians could do what soldiers could not.”
Still there was no sound or movement beyond the drapes.
“A news representative,” I said, “carries Credentials of Impartiality. You know how highly these are held. I only want to ask a few questions. And the answers will be kept confidential…”
For a last time I waited, and there was still no answer. I turned and went up the long room and out. It was not until I was well out on to the street that I let the feeling of triumph within spread out and warm me.
They would take the bait. People of their sort always did. I found my car and drove to Exotic Headquarters.
These were outside the town. There a mercenary commandant named Janol Marat took me in charge. He conducted me to the bubble structure of their HQ building. There was a feel of purpose, there, a sure and cheerful air of activity. They were well armed, well trained. After the Friendlies it jumped at me. I said so to Janol.
“We’ve got a Dorsai Commander and we outnumber the opposition.” He grinned at me. He had a deeply tanned, long face that went into deep creases as his lips curved up. “That makes everybody pretty optimistic. Besides, our commander gets promoted if he wins. Back to the Exotics and staff rank—out of field combat for good. It’s good business for us to win.”
I laughed and he laughed.
“Tell me more, though,” I said. “I want reasons I can use in the stories I send back to News Network.”
“Well”—he answered the snappy salute of a passing groupman, a Cassidan, by the look of him—“I guess you might mention the usual— the fact our Exotic employers don’t permit themselves to use violence and consequently they’re always rather generous than otherwise when it comes to paying for men and equipment. And the OutBond—that’s the Exotic Ambassador to St. Marie, you know—”
“I know.”
“He replaced the former OutBond here three years ago. Anyway, he’s something special, even for someone from Mara or Kultis. He’s an expert in ontogenic calculations. If that means much to you. It’s all over my head.” Janol pointed. “Here’s the Field Commander’s office. He’s Kensie Graeme.”
“Graeme?” I said, frowning. I had spent a day at the Hague looking up Kensie Graeme before I came, but I wanted Janol’s reactions to him. “Sounds familiar.” We approached the office building. “Graeme…”
“You’re probably thinking of another member of the same family.” Janol took the bait. “Donal Graeme. A nephew. The one who pulled that wild stunt not long ago, attacking Newton with just a handful of Freiland ships. Kensie is Donal’s uncle. Not as spectacular as the young Graeme, but I’ll bet you’ll like him better than you would the nephew. Kensie’s got two men’s likeableness.” He looked at me, grinning slightly again.
“That supposed to mean something special?” I said.
“That’s right,” said Janol. “His own likeableness and his twin brother’s, too. Meet Ian Graeme sometime when you’re in Blauvain. That’s where the Exotic Embassy is, east of here. Ian’s a dark man.”
We walked into the office.
“I can’t get used,” I said, “to how so many Dorsai seem related.”
“Neither can I. Actually, I guess it’s because there really aren’t so many of them. The Dorsai’s a small world, and those that live more than a few years—” Janol stopped by a commandant sitting at a desk. “Can we see the Old Man, Hari? This is a News Network man.”
“Why, I guess so.“ The other looked at his desk signal board. “The OutBond’s with him, but he’s just leaving now. Go on in.”
Janol led me between the desks. A door at the back of the room opened before we reached it and a calm-faced man of middle age wearing a blue robe and close-cropped white hair came out. He looked strange but not ridiculous—particularly after you met his odd, hazel-colored eyes.
He was an Exotic.

I knew of Padma, as I knew the Exotics. I had seen them on their own home worlds of Mara and Kultis. A people committed to nonviolence, mystics but very practical mystics, masters of what were known as the “strange sciences”—a dozen wizardic step-children of early psychology, sociology and the humanistic fields of research.
“Sir,” said Janol to Padma, “this is-”
“Tam Olyn. I know,” said Padma softly. He smiled up at me, and those eyes of his seemed to catch light for a moment and blind me. “I was sorry to learn about your brother-in-law, Tarn.”
I went quite cool all over. I had been ready to walk on, but now I stood stock-still and looked at him.
“My brother-in-law?” I said.
“The young man who died near Castlemain, on New Earth.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, between stiff lips. “I’m surprised that you’d know.”
“I know because of you, Tarn.” Once more the hazel eyes of Padma seemed to catch light. “We have a science called ontogenics, by which we calculate the probabilities of human actions in present and future situations. You’ve been an important factor in those calculations for some time.” He smiled. “That’s why I was expecting to meet you here, and now. We’ve calculated you into our present situation here on St. Marie, Tarn.”
“Have you?” I said. “Have you? That’s interesting.”
“I thought it would be,” said Padma softly. “To you, especially. Someone like a newsman, like yourself, would find it interesting.”
“It is,” I said. “It sounds like you know more than I do about what I’m going to be doing here.”
“We’ve got calculations,” said Padma in his soft voice, “to that effect. Come see me in Blauvain, Tarn; and I’ll show you.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“You’ll be very welcome.” Padma inclined his head. His blue robe whispered on the floor as he turned, and went out of the room.
“This way,” said Janol, touching my elbow. I started as if I had just wakened from a deep sleep. “The commander’s in here.”
I followed him automatically into a further office. The individual I had come to see stood up as we came through the door. He was a great, lean man in field uniform, with a heavy-boned, but open, smiling face under black, slightly curly hair. A sort of golden warmth of personality—a strange thing in a Dorsai—seemed to flow out from him as he rose to meet me and his long-fingered, powerful hand swallowed mine in a handshake.
“Come on in,” he said. “Let me fix you up with a drink. Janol,” he added to my mercenary commandant from New Earth, “no need for you to stick around. Go on to chow. And tell the rest of them in the outer office to knock off.”
Janol saluted and went. I sat down as Graeme turned to a small bar cabinet behind his desk. And for the first time in three years, under the magic of the unusual fighting man opposite me, a little peace came into my soul. With someone like this on my side, I could not lose.
III
“Credentials?” asked Graeme, as soon as we were settled with drinks of Dorsai whisky—which is a fine whisky—in our hands.
I passed my papers over. He glanced through them, picking out the letters from Sayona, the Bond of Kultis, to “Commander—St. Marie Field Forces.” He looked these over and put them aside. He handed me back the credentials folder.
“You stopped at Joseph’s Town first?” he said.
I nodded. I saw him looking at my face, and his own sobered.
“You don’t like the Friendlies,” he said.
His words took my breath away. I had come prepared to fence for an opening to tell him. It was too sudden. I looked away.
I did not dare answer right away. I could not. There was either too much or too little to say if I let it come out without thinking. Then I got a grip on myself.
“If I do anything at all with the rest of my life,” I said, slowly, “it’ll be to do everything in my power to remove the Friendlies and all they stand for from the community of civilized human beings.”
I looked back up at him. He was sitting with one massive elbow on his desktop, watching me.
“That’s a pretty harsh point of view, isn’t it?”
“No harsher than theirs.”
“Do you think so?” he said seriously. “I wouldn’t say so.”
“I thought,” I said, “you were the one who was fighting them.”
“Why, yes.” He smiled a little. “But we’re soldiers on both sides.”
“I don’t think they think that way.”
He shook his head a little.
“What makes you say that?” he said.
“I’ve seen them,” I answered. “I got caught up front in the lines on Castlemain on New Earth, three years ago.” I tapped my stiff knee. “I got shot and I couldn’t navigate. The Cassidans around me began to retreat—they were mercenaries, and the troops opposing them were Friendlies hired out as mercenaries.”
I stopped and took a drink of the whisky. When I took the glass away, Graeme had not moved. He sat as if waiting.
“There was young Cassidan, a buck soldier,” I said. “I was doing a series on the campaign from an individual point of view. I’d picked him for my individual. It was a natural choice. You see”—I drank again, and emptied the glass—“my younger sister went out on contract as an accountant to Cassida two years before that, and she’d married him. He was my brother-in-law.”

Graeme took the glass from my hand and silently replenished it.
“He wasn’t actually a military man,” I said. “He was studying shift mechanics and he had about three years to go. But he stood low on one of the competitive examinations at a time when Cassida owed a contractual balance of troops to New Earth.” I took a deep breath. “Well, to make a long story short, he ended up on New Earth in this same campaign I was covering. Because of the series I was writing, he was assigned to me. We both thought it was a good deal for him, that he’d be safer that way.”
I drank some more of the whisky.
“But,” I said, “you know, there’s always a better story a little deeper in the combat zone. We got caught up front one day when the New Earth troops were retreating. I picked up a needle through the kneecap. The Friendly armor was moving up and things were getting hot. The soldiers around us took off toward the rear in a hurry, but Dave tried to carry me, because he thought the Friendly armor would fry me before they had time to notice I was a non-combatant. Well,” I took another deep breath, “the Friendly ground troops caught us. They took us to a sort of clearing where they had a lot of prisoners and kept us there for a while. Then a groupman—one of their fanatic types, a tall, starved-looking soldier about my age—came up with orders they were to reform for a fresh attack.”
I stopped and took another drink. But I could not taste it.
“That meant they couldn’t spare men to guard the prisoners. They’d have to turn them loose back of the Friendly lines. The Groupman said that wouldn’t work. They’d have to make sure the prisoners couldn’t endanger them.”
Graeme was still watching me.
“I didn’t understand. I didn’t even catch on when the other Friendlies—none of them were non-coms like the Groupman—objected.” I put my glass on the desk beside me and stared at the wall of the office, seeing it all over again, as plainly as if I looked through a window at it. “I remember how the Groupman pulled himself up straight. I saw his eyes. As if he’d been insulted by the others, objecting.
“Are they Chosen of God? he shouted at them. Are they of the Chosen?”
I looked across at Kensie Graeme and saw him still motionless, still watching me, his own glass small in one big hand.
“You understand?” I said to him. “As if because the prisoners weren’t Friendlies, they weren’t quite human. As if they were some lower order it was all right to kill.” I shook, suddenly. “And he did it! I sat there against a tree, safe because of my News Correspondent’s uniform and watched him shoot them down. All of them. I sat there and looked at Dave, and he looked at me, sitting there, as the Groupman shot him!”
I quit all at once. I hadn’t meant to have it all come out like that. It was just that I’d been able to tell no one who would understand how helpless I had been. But something about Graeme had given me the idea he would understand.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, and took and filled my glass again. “That sort of thing’s very bad. Was the Groupman found and tried under the Mercenaries Code?”
“After it was too late, yes.”

He nodded and looked past me at the wall. “They aren’t all like that, of course.”
“There’s enough to give them a reputation for it.”
“Unfortunately, yes. Well”—he smiled slightly at me—“we’ll try and keep that sort of thing out of this campaign.”
“Tell me something,” I said, putting my glass down. “Does that sort of thing—as you put it—ever happen to the Friendlies, themselves?”
Something took place then in the atmosphere of the room. There was a little pause before he answered. I felt my heart beat slowly, three times, as I waited for him to speak.
He said at last, “No, it doesn’t.”
“Why not?” I said.
The feeling in the room became stronger. And I realized I had gone too fast. I had been sitting talking to him as a man and forgetting what else he was. Now I began to forget that he was a man and become conscious of him as a Dorsai—an individual as human as I was, but trained all his life, and bred down the generations to a difference. He did not move or change the tone of his voice, or any such thing; but somehow he seemed to move off some distance from me, up into a higher, colder, stonier land into which I could venture only at my peril.
I remembered what was said about his people from that small, cold stony-mountained world: that if the Dorsai chose to withdraw their fighting men from the services of all the other worlds, and challenge those other worlds, not the combined might of the rest of civilization could stand against them. I had never really believed that before. I had never even really thought much about it. But sitting there just then, because of what was happening in the room, suddenly it became real to me. I could feel the knowledge, cold as a wind blowing on me off a glacier, that it was true; and then he answered my question.
“Because,” said Kensie Graeme, “anything like that is specifically prohibited by Article Two of the Mercenaries’ Code.”
Then he broke out abruptly into a smile and what I had just felt in the room withdrew. I breathed again.
“Well,” he said, putting his glass down empty on the desk, “how about joining us in the Officers’ Mess for something to eat?”

I had dinner with them and the meal was very pleasant. They wanted to put me up for the night—but I could feel myself being pulled back to that cold, joyless compound near Joseph’s Town, where all that waited for me was a sort of cold and bitter satisfaction at being among my enemies.
I went back.
It was about eleven p.m. when I drove through the gate of the compound and parked, just as a figure came out of the entrance to Jamethon’s headquarters. The square was dim-lighted with only a few spotlights about the walls, their light lost in the rain-wet pavement. For a moment I did not recognize the figure—and then I saw it was Jamethon.
He would have passed by me at some distance, but I got out of my car and went to meet him. He stopped when I stepped in front of him.
“Mr. Olyn,” be said evenly. In the darkness I could not make out the expression of his face.
“I’ve got a question to ask,” I said, smiling in the darkness.
“It’s late for questions.”
“This won’t take long.” I strained to catch the look on his face, but it was all in shadow. “I’ve been visiting the Exotic camp. Their commander’s a Dorsai. I suppose you know that?”
“Yes.” I could barely see the movement of his lips.
“We got to talking. A question came up and I thought I’d ask you, Commandant. Do you ever order your men to kill prisoners?”
An odd, short silence came between us. Then he answered.
“The killing or abuse of prisoners of war,” he said without emotion, “is forbidden by Article Two of the Mercenaries’ Code.”
“But you aren’t Mercenaries here, are you? You’re native troops in service to your own True Church and Elders.”
“Mr. Olyn,” he said, while I still strained without success to make out the expression of his shadowed face—and it seemed that the words came slowly, though the tone of the voice that spoke them remained as calm as ever, “My Lord has set me to be His servant and a leader among men of war. In neither of those tasks will I fail Him.”
And with that he turned, his face still shadowed and hidden from me, and passed around me and went on.

Alone, I went back inside to my quarters, undressed and lay down on the hard and narrow bed they had given me. The rain outside had stopped at last. Through my open, unglazed window I could see a few stars showing.
I lay there getting ready to sleep and making mental notes on what I would need to do tomorrow. The meeting with Padma the OutBond had jolted me sharply. I took his so-called calculations of human actions with reservation—but I had been shaken to learn of them. I would have to find out more about how much his science of ontogenics knew and could predict. If necessary, from Padma himself. But I would start first with ordinary reference sources.
No one, I thought, would ordinarily entertain the fantastic thought that one man like myself could destroy a culture involving the populations of two worlds. No one, except perhaps a Padma. What I knew, he with his calculations might have discovered. And that was that the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association were facing a decision that would mean life or death to their way of living. A very small thing could tip the scales they weighed on.
For there was a new wind blowing between the stars.
Four hundred years before we had all been men of Earth—Old Earth, the mother planet which was my native soil. One people.
Then, with the movement out to new worlds, the human race had “splintered,” to use an Exotic term. Every small social fragment and psychological type had drawn apart by itself, and joined others like it and progressed toward specialized types. Until we had half a dozen fragments of human types—the warrior on the Dorsai, the philosopher on the Exotic worlds, the hard scientist on Newton, Cassida and Venus, and so forth…
Isolation had bred specific types. Then a growing intercommunication between the younger worlds, now established, and an ever-increasing rate of technological advance had forced specialization. The trade between the worlds was the trade of skilled minds. Generals from the Dorsai were worth their exchange rate in psychiatrists from the Exotics. Communications men like myself from Old Earth brought spaceship designers from Cassida. And so it had been for the last hundred years.
But now the worlds were drifting together. Economics was fusing the race into one whole, again. And the struggle on each world was to gain the advantages of that fusion while holding on to as much as possible of their own ways.
Compromise was necessary—and the harsh, stiff-necked Friendly religion forbade compromise and had made many enemies. Already public opinion moved against the Friendlies on other worlds. Discredit them, smear them, publicly here in this campaign and they would not be able to hire out their soldiers. They would lose the balance of trade they needed to hire the skilled specialists trained by the special facilities of other worlds, and which they needed to keep their own two poor-in-natural-resources worlds alive. They would die.
As young Dave had died. Slowly. In the dark.
… In the darkness now, as I thought of it, it rose up before me once again. It had been only noon when we were taken prisoner, but by the time the Groupman came with his orders for our guards to move up, the sun was almost down.
After they left, after it was all over and I was left alone, I crawled to the bodies in the clearing. And I found Dave among them; and he was not quite gone.
He was wounded in the body and I could not stop the bleeding.
It would not have helped if I had, they told me afterwards. But then it seemed that it would have. So I tried. But finally I gave up and by that time it was quite dark. I only held him and did not know he was dead until he began to grow cold. And then was when I had begun to change into what my uncle had always tried to make me. I felt myself die inside. Dave and my sister were to have been my family, the only family I had ever had hopes of keeping. Instead, I could only sit there in the darkness, holding him and hearing the blood from his red-soaked clothing, falling drop by drop, slowly on the dead variform oak leaves beneath us.

I lay there now in the Friendly compound, not able to sleep and remembering. And after a while I heard the soldiers marching, forming in the square for midnight service.
I lay on my back, listening to them. Their marching feet stopped at last. The single window of my room was over my bed—high in the wall against which the left side of my cot was set. It was unglazed and the night air with its sounds came freely through it along with the dim light from the square which painted a pale rectangle on the opposite wall of my room. I lay watching that rectangle and listening to the service outside; and I heard the duty officer lead them in a prayer for worthiness. After that they sang their battle hymn again, and I lay hearing it, this time, all the way through.
Soldier, ask not—now, or ever, 
Where to war your banners go.
Anarch’s legions all surround us. 
Strike! And do not count the blow!
Glory, honor—praise and profit, 
Are but toys of tinsel worth. 
Render up your work, unasking, 
Leave the human clay to earth.
Blood and sorrow—pain unending, 
Are the portion of us all. 
Grasp the naked sword, opposing. 
Gladly in the battle fall.
So shall we, anointed soldiers, 
Stand at last before the Throne. 
Baptized in our wounds, red-flowing, 
Sealed unto our Lord—alone!
After that they dispersed to cots no different from mine.
I lay there listening to the silence in the square and the measured dripping of a rainspout outside by my window, its slow drops falling after the rain, one by one, uncounted in the darkness.
IV
After the day I landed, there was no more rain. Day by day the fields dried. Soon they would be firm underneath the weight of heavy surface-war equipment, and everyone knew that then the Exotic spring offensive would get under way. Meanwhile both Exotic and Friendly troops were in training.
During the next few weeks, I was busy about my newswork. Mostly feature and small stories on the soldiers and the native people. I had dispatches to send and I sent them faithfully. A correspondent is only as good as his contacts; I made contacts everywhere but among the Friendly troops. These remained aloof, though I talked to many of them. They refused to show fear or doubt.
I had heard these Friendly soldiers were generally undertrained because the suicidal tactics of their officers kept their ranks always filled with green replacements. But the ones here were the remnants of an Expeditionary Force six times their present numbers. They were all veterans, though most of them were in their teens. Only here and there, among the non-corns, and more often among the commissioned officers, I saw the prototype of the non-com who had ordered the prisoners shot on New Earth. Here, the men of this type looked like rabid, gray wolves mixed among polite, well-schooled young dogs just out of puppyhood.
It was a temptation to think that they alone were what I had set out to destroy.
To fight that temptation I told myself that Alexander the Great had led expeditions against the hill tribes and ruled in Pella, capital of Macedonia, and ordered men put to death when he was sixteen. But still the Friendly soldiers looked young to me. I could not help contrasting them with the adult, experienced mercenaries in Kensie Graeme’s forces. For the Exotics, in obedience to their principles, would hire no drafted troops or soldiers who were not in uniform of their own free will.
Meanwhile I had heard no word from the Blue Front. But by the time two weeks had gone, I had my own connections in New San Marcos, and at the beginning of the third week one of these brought me word that the jewelers shop in Wallace Street there had closed its door —had pulled its blinds and emptied the long room of stock and fixtures, and moved or gone out of business. That was all I needed to know.
For the next few days, I stayed in the vicinity of Jamethon Black himself, and by the end of the week my watching him paid off.
At ten o’clock that Friday night I was up on a catwalk just above my quarters and under the sentry-walk of the walls, watching as three civilians with Blue Front written all over them drove into the square, got out and went into Jamethon’s office.
They stayed a little over an hour. When they left, I went back down to bed. That night I slept soundly.

The next morning I got up early, and there was mail for me. A message had come by spaceliner from the director of News Network back on Earth, personally congratulating me on my dispatches. Once, three years before, this would have meant a great deal to me. Now, I only worried that they would decide I had made the situation here newsworthy enough to require extra people being sent out to help me. I could not risk having other news personnel here now to see what I was doing.
I got in my car and headed east along the highway to New San Marcos and the Exotic Headquarters. The Friendly troops were already out in the field; eighteen kilometers east of Joseph’s Town, I was stopped by a squad of five young soldiers with no non-com over them. They recognized me.
“In God’s name, Mr. Olyn,” said the first one to reach my car, bending down to speak to me through the open window at my left shoulder. “You cannot go through.”
“Mind if I ask why?” I said.
He turned and pointed out and down into a little valley between two wooded hills at our left.
“Tactical survey in progress.”
I looked. The little valley or meadow was perhaps a hundred yards wide between the wooded slopes, and it wound away from me and curved to disappear to my right. At the edge of the wooded slopes where they met open meadow, there were lilac bushes with blossoms several days old. The meadow itself was green and fair with the young chartreuse grass of early summer and the white and purple of the lilacs, and the variform oaks behind the lilacs were fuzzy in outline, with small, new leaves.
In the middle of all this, in the center of the meadow, were black-clad figures moving about with computing devices, measuring and figuring the possibilities of death from every angle. In the very center of the meadow for some reason they had set up marking stakes—a single stake, then a stake in front of that with two stakes on either side of it, and one more stake in line before these. Farther on was another single stake, down, as if fallen on the grass and discarded.
I looked back up into the lean young face of the soldier.
“Getting ready to defeat the Exotics?” I said.
He took it as if it had been a straightforward question, with no irony in my voice at all.
“Yes sir,” he said seriously. I looked at him and at the taut skin and clear eyes of the rest.
“Ever think you might lose?”
“No, Mr. Olyn.” He shook his head solemnly. “No man loses who goes to battle for the Lord.” He saw that I needed to be convinced, and he went about it earnestly. “He hath set His hand upon His soldiers. And all that is possible to them is victory—or sometimes death. And what is death?”
He looked to his fellow soldiers and they all nodded.
“What is death?” they echoed.
I looked at them. They stood there asking me and each other what was death as if they were talking about some hard but necessary job.
I had an answer for them, but I did not say it. Death was a Groupman, one of their own kind, giving orders to soldiers just like themselves to assassinate prisoners. That was death.
“Call an officer,” I said. “My pass lets me through here.”
“I regret, sir,” said the one who had been talking to me. “We cannot leave our posts to summon an officer. One will come soon.”
I had a hunch what “soon” meant, and I was right. It was high noon before a Force Leader came by to order them to chow and let me through.

As I pulled into Kensie Graeme’s Headquarters, the sun was low, patterning the ground with the long shadows of trees. Yet it was as if the camp was just waking up. I did not need experience to see the Exotics were beginning to move at last against Jamethon.
I found Janol Marat, the New Earth commandant.
“I’ve got to see Field Commander Graeme,” I said.
He shook his head, for all that we now knew each other well.
“Not now, Tarn. I’m sorry.”
“Janol,” I said, “this isn’t for an interview. It’s a matter of life and death. I mean that. I’ve got to see Kensie.”
He stared at me. I stared back.
“Wait here,” he said. We were standing just inside the headquarters office. He went out and was gone for perhaps five minutes. I stood, listening to the wall clock ticking away. Then he came back.
“This way,” he said.
He led me outside and back between the bubble roundness of the plastic buildings to a small structure half-hidden in some trees. When we stepped through its front entrance, I realized it was Kensie’s personal quarters. We passed through a small sitting room into a combination bedroom and bath. Kensie had just stepped out of the shower and was getting into battle clothes. He looked at me curiously, then turned his gaze back on Janol.
“All right, Commandant,” he said, “you can get back to your duties, now.”
“Sir,” said Janol, without looking at me.
He saluted and left.
“All right, Tarn,” Kensie said, pulling on a pair of uniform slacks. “What is it?”
“I know you’re ready to move out,” I said.
He looked at me a little humorously as he locked the waistband of his slacks. He had not yet put on his shirt, and in that relatively small room he loomed like a giant, like some irresistible natural force. His body was tanned like dark wood and the muscles lay in flat bands across his chest and shoulders. His belly was hollow and the cords in his arms came and went as he moved them. Once more I felt the particular, special element of the Dorsai in him. It was not just his physical size and strength. It was not even the fact that he was someone trained from birth to war, someone bred for battle. No, it was something living but untouchable—the same quality of difference to be found in the pure Exotic like Padma the OutBond, or in some Newtonian or Cassidan researchist. Something so much above and beyond the common form of man that it was like a serenity, a sense of conviction where his own type of thing was concerned that was so complete it made him beyond all weaknesses, untouchable, unconquerable.
I saw the slight, dark shadow of Jamethon Black in my mind’s eye, standing opposed to such a man as this; and the thought of any victory for Jamethon was unthinkable, an impossibility.
But there was always danger.
“All right, I’ll tell you what I came about,” I said to Kensie. “I’ve just found out Black’s been in touch with the Blue Front, a native terrorist political group with its headquarters in Blauvain. Three of them visited him last night. I saw them.”
Kensie picked up his shirt and slid a long arm into one sleeve.
“I know,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Don’t you understand?” I said. “They’re assassins. It’s their stock in trade. And the one man they and Jamethon Black both could use out of the way is you.”
He put his other arm in a sleeve.
“I know that,” he said. “They want the present government here on St. Marie out of the way and themselves in power—which isn’t possible with Exotic money hiring us to keep the peace here.”
“They haven’t had Jamethon Black’s help.”
“Have they got it now?” he asked, sealing the shirt closure between thumb and forefinger.
“The Friendlies are desperate,” I said. “Even if reinforcements arrived tomorrow, Jamethon knows what his chances are with you ready to move. Assassins may be outlawed by the Conventions of War and the Mercenaries’ Code, but you and I know the Friendlies.”
Kensie looked at me oddly and picked up his jacket.
“Do we?” he said.
I met his eyes. “Don’t we?”
“Tarn.” He put on the jacket and closed it. “I know the men I have to fight. It’s my business to know. But what makes you think you know them?”
“They’re my business too,” I said. “Maybe you’d forgotten. I’m a newsman. People are my business, first, last and always.”
“But you’ve got no use for the Friendlies.”
“Should I?” I said. “I’ve been on all the worlds. I’ve seen the Cetan entrepreneur—and he wants his margin, but he’s a human being. I’ve seen the Newtonian and the Cassidan with their heads in the clouds, but if you yanked on their sleeves hard enough, you could pull them back to reality. I’ve seen Exotics like Padma at their mental parlor tricks, and the Freilander up to his ears in his own red tape. I’ve seen them from my own world of Old Earth, and Goby, and Venus and even from the Dorsai, like you. And I tell you they’ve all got one thing in common. Underneath it all they’re human. Every one of them’s human—they’ve just specialized in some one, valuable way.”
“And the Friendlies haven’t?”
“Fascinaticism,” I said. “Is that valuable? It’s just the opposite. What’s good—what’s even permissible about blind, deaf, dumb, unthinking faith that doesn’t let a man reason for himself?”
“How do you know they don’t reason?” Kensie asked. He was standing facing me now.
“Maybe some of them do,” I said. “Maybe the young ones, before the poison’s had time to work in. What good does that do, as long as the culture exists?”

A sudden silence came into the room.
“What are you talking about?” said Kensie.
“I mean you want the assassins,” I said. “You don’t want the Friendly troops. Prove that Jamethon Black has broken the Conventions of War by arranging with them to kill you; and you can win St. Marie for the Exotics without firing a shot.”
“And how would I do that?”
“Use me,” I said. “I’ve got a pipeline to the political group the assassins represent. Let me go to them as your representative and outbid Jamethon. You can offer them recognition by the present government, now. Padma and the present St. Marie government heads would have to back you up if you could clean the planet of Friendlies that easily.”
He looked at me with no expression at all.
“And what would I be supposed to buy with this?” he said.
“Sworn testimony they’d been hired to assassinate you. As many of them as needed could testify.”
“No Court of Interplanetary Inquiry would believe people like that,” Kensie said.
“Ah,” I said, and I could not help smiling. “But they’d believe me as a News Network Representative when I backed up every word that was said.”
There was a new silence. His face had no expression at all.
“I see,” he said.
He walked past me into the salon. I followed him. He went to his phone, put his finger on a stud and spoke into an imageless, gray screen.
“Janol,” he said.
He turned away from the screen, crossed the room to an arms cabinet and began putting on his battle harness. He moved deliberately and neither looked nor spoke in my direction. After a few long minutes, the building entrance slid aside and Janol stepped in.
“Sir?” said the Freilander officer.
“Mr. Olyn stays here until further orders.”
“Yes sir,” said Janol.
Graeme went out
I stood numb, staring at the entrance through which he had left. I could not believe that he would violate the Conventions so far himself as not only to disregard me, but to put me essentially under arrest to keep me from doing anything further about the situation.
I turned to Janol. He was looking at me with a sort of wry sympathy on his long, brown face.
“Is the OutBond here in camp?” I asked him.
“No.” He came up to me. “He’s back in the Exotic Embassy in Blauvain. Be a good fella now and sit down, why don’t you? We might as well kill the next few hours pleasantly.”
We were standing face to face; I hit him in the stomach.
I had done a little boxing as an undergraduate on the college level. I mention this not to make myself out a sort of muscular hero, but to explain why I had sense enough not to try for his jaw. Graeme could probably have found the knockout point there without even thinking, but I was no Dorsai. The area below a man’s breastbone is relatively large, soft, handy and generally just fine for amateurs. And I did know something about how to punch.
For all that, Janol was not knocked out. He went over on the floor and lay there doubled up with his eyes still open. But he was not ready to get up right away. I turned and went quickly out of the building.
The camp was busy. Nobody stopped me. I got back into my car, and five minutes later I was free on the darkening road for Blauvain.
V
From New San Marcos to Blauvain and Padma’s Embassy was fourteen hundred kilometers. I should have made it in six hours, but a bridge was washed out and I took fourteen.
It was after eight the following morning when I burst into the half-park, half-building that was the embassy.
“Padma—” I said. “Is he still—”
“Yes, Mr. Olyn,” said the girl receptionist. “He’s expecting you.”
She smiled above her purple robe. I did not mind. I was too busy being glad Padma had not already taken off for the fringe areas of the conflict.
She took me down and around a corner and turned me over to a young male Exotic, who introduced himself as one of Padma’s secretaries. He took me a short distance and introduced me to another secretary, a middle-aged man this time, who led me through several rooms and then directed me down a long corridor and around a corner, beyond which he said was the entrance to the office area where Padma worked at the moment. Then he left me.
I followed his direction. But when I stepped through that entrance it was not into a room, but into a further short corridor. And I checked, stopping myself dead. For what I suddenly thought I saw coming at me was Kensie Graeme—Kensie with murder on his mind.
But the man who looked like Kensie merely glanced at me and dismissed me, continuing to come on. Then I knew.
Of course, he was not Kensie. He was Kensie’s twin brother, Ian, commander of Garrison Forces for the Exotics, here in Blauvain. He strode on toward me; and I began once more to walk toward him, but the shock stayed with me until we had passed one another.
I do not think anyone could have come on him like that, in my position and not been hit the same way. From Janol, at different times, I had gathered how Ian was the converse of Kensie. Not in a military sense—they were both magnificent specimens of Dorsai officers—but in the matter of their individual natures.
Kensie had had a profound effect on me from the first moment, with his cheerful nature and the warmth of being that at times obscured the very fact that he was a Dorsai. When the pressure of military affairs was not directly on him he seemed all sunshine; you could warm yourself in his presence as you might in the sun. Ian, his physical duplicate, striding toward me like some two-eyed Odin, was all shadow.
Here at last was the Dorsai legend come to life. Here was the grim man with the iron heart and the dark and solitary soul. In the powerful fortress of his body, what was essentially Ian dwelt as isolated as a hermit on a mountain. He was the fierce and lonely Highlandman of his distant ancestry, come to life again.
Not law, not ethics, but the trust of the given word, clan-loyalty and the duty of the blood feud held sway in Ian. He was a man who would cross hell to pay a debt for good or ill; and in that moment when I saw him coming toward me and recognized him at last, I suddenly thanked whatever gods were left, that he had no debt with me.

Then we had passed each other, and he was gone around a corner.
Rumor had it, I remembered then, that the blackness around him never lightened except in Kensie’s presence. That he was truly his twin brother’s other half. And that if he should ever lose the light that Kensie’s bright presence shed on him, he would be doomed to his own lightlessness forever.
It was a statement I was to remember at a later time, as I was to remember seeing him come toward me in that moment.
But now I forgot him as I went forward through another entrance into what looked like a small conservatory and saw the gentle face and short-cropped white hair of Padma, the OutBond, wearing a pale yellow robe.
“Come in, Mr. Olyn,” he said, getting up. “And come along with me.”
He turned and walked out through an archway of purple clematis blooms. I followed him, and found a small courtyard, all but filled with the elliptical shape of a sedan aircar. Padma was already climbing into one of the seats facing the controls. He held the door for me.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I got in.
He touched the autopilot panel; the ship rose in the air. He left it to its own navigation, and pivoted his chair about to face me.
“To Commander Graeme’s headquarters in the field,” he answered.
His eyes were a light hazel color, but they seemed to catch and swim with the sunlight striking through the transparent top of the aircar, as we reached altitude and began to move horizontally. I could not read them, or the expression on his face.
“I see,” I said. “Of course, I know a call from Graeme’s HQ could get to you much faster than I could by groundcar from the same spot. But I hope you aren’t thinking of having him kidnap me or something like that. I have Credentials of Impartiality protecting me as a Newsman, as well as authorizations from both the Friendly and the Exotic worlds. And I don’t intend to be held responsible for any conclusions drawn by Graeme after the conversation the two of us had earlier this morning—alone.”
Padma sat still in his aircar seat, facing me. His hands were folded in his lap together, pale against the yellow robe, but with strong sinews showing under the skin of their backs.
“You’re coming with me now by my decision, not Kensie Graeme’s.”
“I want to know why,” I said tensely.
“Because,” he said slowly, “you are very dangerous.” And he sat still, looking at me with unwavering eyes.
I waited for him to go on, but he did not. “Dangerous?” I said. “Dangerous to who?”
“To the future of all of us.”
I stared at him, then I laughed. I was angry.
“Cut it out!” I said.
He shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. I was baffled by those eyes. Innocent and open as a child’s, but I could not see through them into the man himself.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me, why am I dangerous?”
“Because you want to destroy a race of people. And you know how.”

There was a short silence. The aircar fled on through the skies without a sound.
“Now that’s an odd notion,” I said slowly and calmly. “I wonder where you got it?”
“From our ontogenic calculations,” said Padma, as calmly as I had spoken. “And it’s not a notion, Tarn. As you know yourself.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Ontogenics. I was going to look that up.”
“You did look it up, didn’t you, Tarn?”
“Did I?” I said. “I guess I did, at that. It didn’t seem very clear to me, though, as I remember. Something about evolution.”
“Ontogenics,” said Padma, “is the study of the effect of evolution upon the interacting forces of human society.”
“Am I an interacting force?”
“At the moment and for the past several years, yes,” said Padma. “And possibly for some years into the future. But possibly not.”
“That sounds almost like a threat.”
“In a sense it is.” Padma’s eyes caught the light as I watched them. “You’re capable of destroying yourself as well as others.”
“I’d hate to do that.”
“Then,” said Padma, “you’d better listen to me.”
“Why, of course,” I said. “That’s my business, listening. Tell me all about ontogenics—and myself.”
He made an adjustment in the controls, then swung his seat back to face mine once more.
“The human race,” said Padma, “broke up in an evolutionary explosion at the moment in history when interstellar colonization became practical.” He sat watching me. I kept my face attentive. “This happened for reasons stemming from racial instinct which we haven’t completely charted yet, but which was essentially self-protective in nature.”
I reached into my jacket pocket.
“Perhaps I’d better take a few notes,” I said.
“If you want to,” said Padma, unperturbed. “Out of that explosion came cultures individually devoted to single facets of the human personality. The fighting, combative facet became the Dorsai. The facet which surrendered the individual wholly to some faith or other became the Friendly. The philosophical facet created the Exotic culture to which I belong. We call these Splinter Cultures.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I know about Splinter Cultures.”
“You know about them, Tam, but you don’t know them.”
“I don’t?”
“No,” said Padma, “because you, like all our ancestors, are from Earth. You’re old, full-spectrum man. The Splinter peoples are evolutionarily advanced over you.”
I felt a little twist of bitter anger knot suddenly inside me.
“Oh? I’m afraid I don’t see that.”
“Because you don’t want to,” said Padma. “If you did, you’d have to admit that they were different from you, and had to be judged by different standards.”
“Different? How?”
“Different in a sense that all Splinter people, including myself, understand instinctively, but full-spectrum man has to extrapolate to imagine.” Padma shifted a little in his seat. “You’ll get some idea, Tam, if you imagine a member of a Splinter culture to be a man like yourself, only with a monomania that shoves him wholly toward being one type of person. But with this difference: Instead of all parts of his mental and physical self outside the limits of that monomania being ignored and atrophied as, they would be with you—”
I interrupted, “Why specifically with me?”
“With any full-spectrum man, then,” said Padma calmly. “These parts, instead of being atrophied, are altered to agree with and support the monomania, so that we don’t have a sick man—but a healthy, different one.”
“Healthy?” I said, seeing the Friendly non-com on New Earth again in my mind’s eye.
“Healthy as a culture. Not as occasional crippled individuals of that culture. But as a culture.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”
“But you do, Tam,” said Padma, softly. “Unconsciously you do. Because you’re planning to take advantage of the weakness such a culture must have to destroy it.”
“And what weakness is that?”
“The obvious weakness that’s the converse of any strength,” said Padma. “The Splinter Cultures are not viable.”
I must have blinked. I was honestly bewildered.
“Not viable? You mean they can’t live on their own?”
“Of course not,” said Padma. “Faced with an expansion into space, the human race reacted to the challenge of a different environment by trying to adapt to it. It adapted by trying out separately all the elements of its personality, to see which could survive best. Now that all elements —the Splinter Cultures—have survived and adapted, it’s time for them to breed back into each other again, to produce a more hardy, universe-oriented human.”
The aircar began to descend. We were nearing our destination.
“What’s that got to do with me?” I said, at last.
“If you frustrate one of the Splinter Cultures, it can’t adapt on its own as full-spectrum man would do. It will die. And when the race breeds back to a whole, that valuable element will be lost to the race.”
“Maybe it’ll be no loss,” I said, softly in my turn.
“A vital loss,” said Padma. “And I can prove it. You, a full-spectrum man, have in you an element from every Splinter Culture. If you admit this you can identify even with those you want to destroy. I have evidence to show you. Will you look at it?”
The ship touched ground; the door beside me opened. I got out with Padma and found Kensie waiting.
I looked from Padma to Kensie, who stood with us and a head taller than I—two heads taller than OutBond. Kensie looked back down at me with no particular expression. His eyes were not the eyes of his twin brother—but just then, for some reason, I could not meet them.
“I’m a newsman,” I said. “Of course my mind is open.”
Padma turned and began walking toward the headquarters building. Kensie fell in with us and I think Janol and some of the others came along behind, though I didn’t look back to make sure. We went to the inner office where I first met Graeme—just Kensie, Padma and myself. There was a file folder on Graeme’s desk. He picked it up, extracted a photocopy of something and handed it to me as I came up to him.
I took it. There was no doubting its authenticity.

It was a memo from Eldest Bright, ranking elder of the joint government of Harmony and Association, to the Friendly War Chief at the Defense X Center, on Harmony. It was dated two months previously. It was on the single-molecule sheet, where the legend cannot be tampered with, or removed once it is on.
Be Informed, in God’s Name—
—That since it does seem the Lord’s Will that our Brothers on St. Marie make no success, it is ordered that henceforth no more replacements or personnel or supplies be sent them. For if our Captain does intend us the victory, surely we shall conquer without further expenditure. And if it be His will that we conquer not, then surely it would he an impiety to throw away the substance of God’s Churches in an attempt to frustrate that Will.
Be it further ordered that our Brothers on St. Marie be spared the knowledge that no further assistance is forthcoming, that they may bear witness to their faith in battle as ever, and God’s Churches be undismayed. Heed this Command, in the Name of the Lord:
By order of he who is called. . .
Bright Eldest Among The Chosen
I looked up from the memo. Both Graeme and Padma were watching me.
“How’d you get hold of this?” I said. “No, of course you won’t tell me.” The palms of my hands were suddenly sweating so that the slick material of the sheet in my fingers was slippery. I held it tightly, and talked fast to keep their eyes on my face. “But what about it? We already knew this, everybody knew Bright had abandoned them. This just proves it. Why even bother showing it to me?”
“I thought,” said Padma, “it might move you just a little. Perhaps enough to make you take a different view of things.”
I said, “I didn’t say that wasn’t possible. I tell you a Newsman keeps an open mind at all times. Of course,” I picked my words carefully, “if I could study it-”
“I’d hoped you’d take it with you,” said Padma.
“Hoped?”
“If you dig into it and really understand what Bright means there, you might understand all the Friendlies differently. You might change your mind about them.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But-”
“Let me ask you to do that much,” said Padma. “Take the memo with you.”
I stood for a moment, with Padma facing me and Kensie looming behind him, then shrugged and put the memo in my pocket.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it back to my quarters and think about it—I’ve got a groundcar here somewhere, haven’t I?“ And I looked at Kensie.
“Ten kilometers back,” said Kensie. “You wouldn’t get through anyway. We’re moving up for the assault and the Friendlies are maneuvering to meet us.”
“Take my aircar,” said Padma. “The Embassy flags on it will help.”
“All right,” I said.
We went out together toward the aircar. I passed Janol in the outer office and he met my eyes coldly. I did not blame him. We walked to the aircar and I got in.
“You can send the aircar back whenever you’re through with it,” said Padma, as I stepped in through the entrance section of its top. “It’s an Embassy loan to you, Tam. I won’t worry about it.”
“No,” I said. “You needn’t worry.”
I closed the section and touched the controls.
It was a dream of an aircar. It went up into the air as lightly as thought, and in a second I was two thousand feet up and well away from the spot. I made myself calm down, though, before I reached into my pocket and took the memo out.
I looked at it. My hand still trembled a little as I held it.
Here it was in my grasp at last. What I had been after from the start. And Padma himself had insisted I carry it away with me.
It was the lever, the Archimedes pry-bar which would move not one world but fourteen. And push the Friendly Peoples over the edge to extinction.
VI
They were waiting for me. They converged on the aircar as I landed it in the interior square of the Friendlies compound, all four of them with black rifles at the ready.
They were apparently the only ones left. Black seemed to have turned out every other man of his remnant of a battle unit. And these were all men I recognized, case-hardened veterans. One was the Groupman who had been in the office that first night when I had come back from the Exotic camp and stepped in to speak to Black, asking him if he ever ordered his men to kill prisoners. Another was a forty-year-old Force Leader, the lowest commissioned rank, but acting Major—just as Black, a Commandant, was acting as Expeditionary Field Commander —a position equivalent to Kensie Graeme’s. The other two soldiers were non-commissioned, but similar. I knew them all. Ultrafanatics. And they knew me.
We understood each other.
“I have to see the commandant,” I said, as I got out, before they could begin to question me.
“On what business?” said the Force Leader. “This aircar hath no business here. Nor thyself.”
I said, “I must see Commandant Black immediately. I wouldn’t be here in a car flying the flags of the Exotic Embassy if it wasn’t necessary.”
They could not take the chance that my reason for seeing Black wasn’t important, and I knew it. They argued a little, but I kept insisting I had to see the Commandant. Finally, the Force Leader took me across into the same outer office where I had always waited to see Black.
I faced Jamethon Black alone in the office.
He was putting on his battle harness, as I had seen Graeme putting on his earlier. On Graeme, the harness and the weapons it carried had looked like toys. On Jamethon’s slight frame they looked almost too heavy to bear.
“Mr. Olyn,” he said.
I walked across the room toward him, drawing the memo from my pocket as I came. He turned a little to face me, his fingers sealing the locks on his harness, jingling slightly with his weapons and his harness as he turned.
“You’re taking the field against the Exotics,” I said.
He nodded. I had never been this close to him before. From across the room I would have believed he was holding his usual stony expression, but standing just a few feet from him now I saw the tired wraith of a smile touch the corners of his straight mouth in that dark, young face, for a second.
“That is my duty, Mr. Olyn.”
“Some duty,” I said. “When your superiors back on Harmony have already written you off their books.”
“I’ve already told you,” he said, calmly. “The Chosen are not betrayed in the Lord, one by another.”
“You’re sure of that?” I said.
Once more I saw that little ghost of a weary smile.
“It’s a subject, Mr. Olyn, on which I am more expert than you.”

I looked into his eyes. They were exhausted but calm. I glanced aside at the desk where the picture of the church, the older man and woman and the young girl stood still.
“Your family?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“It seems to me you’d think of them in a time like this.”
“I think of them quite often.”
“But you’re going to go out and get yourself killed just the same.”
“Just the same,” he said.
“Sure!” I said. “You would!” I had come in calm and in control of myself. But now it was as if a cork had been pulled on all that had been inside me since Dave’s death. I began to shake. “Because that’s the kind of hypocrites you are—all of you Friendlies. You’re so lying, so rotten clear through with your own lies, if someone took them away from you there’d be nothing left. Would there? So you’d rather die now than admit committing suicide like this isn’t the most glorious thing in the universe. You’d rather die than admit you’re just as full of doubts as anyone else, just as afraid.”
I stepped right up to him. He did not move.
“Who’re you trying to fool?” I said. “Who? I see through you just like the people on all the other worlds do! I know you know what a mumbo-jumbo your United Churches are. I know you know the way of life you sing of through your nose so much isn’t what you claim it is. I know your Eldest Bright and his gang of narrow-minded old men are just a gang of world-hungry tyrants that don’t give a damn for religion or anything as long as they get what they want. I know you know it— and I’m going to make you admit it!”
And I shoved the memo under his nose.
“Read it!”
He took it from me. I stepped back from him, shaking badly as I watched him.
He studied it for a long minute, while I held my breath. His face did not change. Then handed it back to me.
“Can I give you a ride to meet Graeme?” I said. “We can get across the lines in the OutBond’s aircar. You can get the surrender over with before any shooting breaks out.”
He shook his head. He was looking at me in a particularly level way, with an expression I could not understand.
“What do you mean—no?”
“You’d better stay here,” he said. “Even with ambassadorial flags, that aircar may be shot at over the lines.” And he turned as if he would walk away from me, out the door.
“Where’re you going?” I shouted at him. I got in front of him and pushed the memo before his eyes again. “That’s real. You can’t close your eyes to that!”

He stopped and looked at me. Then he reached out and took my wrist and put my arm and hand with the memo aside. His fingers were thin, but much stronger than I thought, so that I let the arm go down in front of him when I hadn’t intended to do so.
“I know it’s real. I’ll have to warn you not to interfere with me any more, Mr. Olyn. I’ve got to go now.” He stepped past me and walked toward the door.
“You’re a liar!” I shouted after him. He kept on going. I had to stop him. I grabbed the solidograph from his desk and smashed it on the floor.
He turned like a cat and looked at the broken pieces at my feet.
“That’s what you’re doing!” I shouted, pointing at them.
He came back without a word and squatted down and carefully gathered up the pieces, one by one. He put them into his pocket and got back to his feet, and raised his face at last to mine. And when I saw his eyes I stopped breathing.
“If my duty,” he said, in a low, controlled voice, “were not in this minute to—”
His voice stopped. I saw his eyes staring into me; and slowly I saw them change and the murder that was in them soften into something like wonder.
“Thou”—he said, softly—“Thou hast no faith?”
I had opened my mouth to speak. But what he said stopped me. I stood as if punched in the stomach, without the breath for words. He stared at me.
“What made you think,” he said, “that that memo would change my mind?”
“You read it!” I said. “Bright wrote you were a losing proposition here, so you weren’t to get any more help. And no one was to tell you for fear you might surrender if you knew.”
“Is that how you read it?” he said. “Like that?”
“How else? How else can you read it?”
“As it is written.” He stood straight facing me now and his eyes never moved from mine. “You have read it without faith, leaving out the Name and the will of the Lord. Eldest Bright wrote not that we were to be abandoned here—but that since our cause was sore tried, we be put in the hands of our Captain and our God. And further he wrote that we should not be told of this, that none here should be tempted to a vain and special seeking of the martyr’s crown. Look, Mr. Olyn. It’s down there in black and white.”
“But that’s not what he meant! That’s not what he meant!”
He shook his head. “Mr. Olyn, I can’t leave you in such delusion.”
I stared at him, for it was sympathy I saw in his face. For me.
“It’s your own blindness that deludes you,” he said. “You see nothing, and so believe no man can see. Our Lord is not just a name, but all things. That’s why we have no ornament in our churches, scorning any painted screen between us and our God. Listen to me, Mr. Olyn. Those churches themselves are but tabernacles of the earth. Our Elders and Leaders, though they are Chosen and Anointed, are still but mortal men. To none of these things or people do we hearken in our faith, but to the very voice of God within us.”

He paused. Somehow I could not speak.
“Suppose it was even as you think,” he went on, even more gently. “Suppose that all you say was a fact; and that our Elders were but greedy tyrants, ourselves abandoned here by their selfish will and set to fulfill a false and prideful purpose. No.” Jamethon’s voice rose. “Let me attest as if it were only for myself. Suppose that you could give me proof that all our Elders lied, that our very Covenant was false. Suppose that you could prove to me”-~his face lifted to mine and his voice drove at me—“that all was perversion and falsehood, and nowhere among the Chosen, not even in the house of my father, was there faith or hope! If you could prove to me that no miracle could save me, that no soul stood with me—and that opposed were all the legions of the universe—still I, I alone, Mr. Olyn, would go forward as I have been commanded, to the end of the universe, to the culmination of eternity. For without my faith I am but common earth. But with my faith, there is no power can stay me!”
He stopped speaking and turned about. I watched him walk across the room and out the door.
Still I stood there, as if I had been fastened in place—until I heard from outside, in the square of the compound, the sound of a military aircar starting up.
I broke out of my stasis then and ran out of the building.
As I burst into the square, the military aircar was just taking off. I could see Black and his four hard-shell subordinates in it. And I yelled up into the air after them.
“That’s all right for you, but what about your men?”
They could not hear me. I knew that. Uncontrollable tears were running down my face, but I screamed up into the air after him anyway—
“You’re killing your men to prove your point! Can’t you listen? You’re murdering helpless men!”
Unheeding, the military aircar dwindled rapidly to the west and south, where the converging battle forces waited. And the heavy concrete walls and buildings about the empty compound threw back my words with a hollow, wild and mocking echo.
VII
I should have gone to the spaceport. Instead, I got back into the aircar and flew back across the lines looking for Graeme’s Battle Command Center.
I was as little concerned about my own life just then as a Friendly. I think I was shot at once or twice, in spite of the ambassadorial flags on the aircar, but I don’t remember exactly. Eventually I found the Command Center and descended.
Enlisted men surrounded me as I stepped out of the aircar. I showed my credentials and went up to the battle screen, which had been set up in open air at the edge of shadow from some tall variform oaks. Graeme, Padma and his whole staff were grouped around it, watching the movements of their own and the Friendly troops reported on it. A continual low-voiced discussion of the movements went on, and a steady stream of information came from the communications center fifteen feet off.
The sun slanted steeply through the trees. It was almost noon and the day was bright and warm. No one looked at me for a long time; and then Janol, turning away from the screen, caught sight of me standing off at one side by the flat-topped shape of a tactics computer. His face went cold. He went on about what he was doing. But I must have been looking pretty bad, because after a while he came by with a canteen cup and set it down on the computer top. 
“Drink that,” he said shortly, and went off. I picked it up, found it was Dorsai whisky and swallowed it down. I could not taste it; but evidently it did me some good, because in a few minutes the world began to sort itself out around me and I began to think again.
I went up to Janol. “Thanks.”
“All right.” He did not look at me, but went on with the papers on the field desk before him.
“Janol,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“See for yourself,” he said, still bent over his papers.
“I can’t see for myself. You know that. Look—I’m sorry about what I did. But this is my job, too. Can’t you tell me what’s going on now and fight with me afterwards?”
“You know I can’t brawl with civilians.” Then his face relaxed. “All right,” he said, straightening up. “Come on.”
He led me over to the battle screen, where Padma and Kensie were standing, and pointed to a sort of small triangle of darkness between two snakelike lines of light. Other spots and shapes of light ringed it about.
“These”—he pointed to the two snakelike lines—“are the Macintok and Sarah Rivers, where they come together—just about ten miles this side of Joseph’s Town. It’s fairly high ground, hills thick with cover, fairly open between them. Good territory for setting up a stubborn defense, bad area to get trapped in.”
“Why?”
He pointed to the two river lines.
“Get backed up in here and you find yourself hung up on high bluffs over the river. There is no easy way across, no cover for retreating troops. It’s nearly all open farmland the rest of the way, from the other sides of the rivers to Joseph’s Town.”
His finger moved back out from the point where the river lines came together, past the small area of darkness and into the surrounding shapes and rings of light.
“On the other hand, the approach to this territory from our position is through open country, too—narrow strips of farmland interspersed with a lot of swamp and marsh. It’s a tight situation for either commander, if we commit to a battle here. The first one who has to backpedal will find himself in trouble in a hurry.”
“Are you going to commit?”
“It depends. Black sent his light armor forward. Now he’s pulling back into the high ground, between the rivers. We’re far superior in strength and equipment. There’s no reason for us not to go in after him, as long as he’s trapped himself—” Janol broke off.
“No reason?” I asked.
“Not from a tactical standpoint.” Janol frowned at the screen. “We couldn’t get into trouble unless we suddenly had to retreat. And we wouldn’t do that unless he suddenly acquired some great tactical advantage that’d make it impossible for us to stay there.”
I looked at his profile.
“Such as losing Graeme?” I said.
He transferred his frown to me. “There’s no danger of that.”

There was a certain change in the movement and the voices of the people around us. We both turned and looked.
Everybody was clustering around a screen. We moved in with the crowd and, looking between the soldiers of two of the officers of Graeme’s staff, I saw on the screen the image of a small grassy meadow enclosed by wooded hills. In the center of the meadow, the Friendly flag floated its thin black cross on white background beside a long table on the grass. There were folding chairs on each side of the table, but only one person—a Friendly officer, standing on the table’s far side as if waiting. There were the lilac bushes along the edge of the wooded hills where they came down in variform oak and ash to the meadow’s edge; and the lavender blossoms were beginning to brown and darken for their season was almost at an end. So much difference tad twenty-four hours made. Off to the left of the screen I could see tie gray concrete of a highway.
“I know that place—” I started to say, turning to Janol.
“Quiet!” he said, holding up a finger. Around us, everybody else had fallen still. Up near the front of our group a single voice was talking.
“—it’s a truce table.”
“Have they called?” said the voice of Kensie.
“No, sir.”
“Well, let’s go see.” There was a stir up front. The group began to break up and I saw Kensie and Padma walking off toward the area where the aircars were parked. I shoved myself through the thinning crowd like a process server, running after them.
I heard Janol shout behind me, but I paid no attention. Then I was up to Kensie and Padma, who turned.
“I want to go with you,” I said.
“It’s all right, Janol,” Kensie said, looking past me. “You can leave him with us.”
“Yes, sir.” I could hear Janol turn and leave.
“So you want to come with me, Mr. Olyn?” Kensie said.
“I know that spot,” I told him. “I drove by it just earlier today. The Friendlies were taking tactical measurements all over that meadow and the hills on both sides. They weren’t setting up truce talks.”
Kensie looked at me for a long moment, as if he was taking some tactical measurements himself.
“Come on, then,” he said. He turned to Padma. “You’ll be staying here?”
“It’s a combat zone. I’d better not.” Padma turned his unwrinkled face to me. “Good luck, Mr. Olyn,” he said, and walked away. I watched his yellow-robed figure glide over the turf for a second, then turned to see Graeme halfway to the nearest military aircar. I hurried after him.
It was a battle car, not luxurious like the OutBond’s, and Kensie did not cruise at two thousand feet, but snaked it between the trees just a few feet above ground. The seats were cramped. His big frame overfilled his, crowding me where I sat. I felt the butt-plate of his spring pistol grinding into my side with every movement he made on the controls.
We came at last to the edge of the wooded and hilly triangle occupied by the Friendlies and mounted a slope under the cover of the new-leaved variform oaks.
They were massive enough to have killed off most ground cover. Between their pillar-like trunks the ground was shaded, and padded with the brown shapes of dead leaves. Near the crest of the hill, we came upon a unit of Exotic troops resting and waiting the orders to advance. Kensie got out of the car and returned the Force Leader’s salute.
“You’ve seen these tables the Friendlies set up?” Kensie asked.
“Yes, Commander. That officer they’ve got is still standing there. If you go just up over the crest of the slope here, you can see him—and the furniture.”
“Good,” said Kensie. “Keep your men here, Force. The Newsman and I’ll go take a look.”
He led the way up among the oak trees. At the top of the hill we looked down through about fifty yards more of trees and out into the meadow. It was two hundred yards across, the table right in the middle, the unmoving black figure of the Friendly officer standing on its far side.
“What do you think of it, Mr. Olyn?” asked Kensie, looking down through the trees.
“Why hasn’t somebody shot him?” I asked.
He glanced sideways at me.
“There’s plenty of time to shoot him,” he said, “before he can get back to cover on the far side. If we have to shoot him at all. That wasn’t what I wanted to know. You’ve seen the Friendly commander recently. Did he give you the impression he was ready to surrender?”
“No!” I said.
“I see,” said Kensie.
“You don’t really think he means to surrender? What makes you think something like that?”
“Truce tables are generally set up for the discussion of terms between opposing forces,” he said.
“But he hasn’t asked you to meet him?”
“No,” Kensie watched the figure of the Friendly officer, motionless in the sunlight. “It might be against his principles to call for a discussion, but not to discuss—if we just happened to find ourselves across a table from one another.”
He turned and signaled with his hand. The Force Leader, who had been waiting down the slope behind us, came up.
“Sir?” he said to Kensie.
“Any Friendly strength in those trees across the way?”
“Four men, that’s all, sir. Our scopes pick out their body heats clear and sharp. They aren’t attempting to hide.”
“I see.” He paused. “Force.”
“Sir?”
“Be good enough to go down there in the meadow and ask that Friendly officer what this is all about.”
“Yes, sir.”
We stood and watched as the Force Leader went stiff-legging it down the steep slope between the trees. He crossed the grass—it seemed very slowly—and came up to the Friendly officer.
They stood facing each other. They were talking but there was no way to hear their voices. The flag with its thin black cross whipped in the little breeze that was blowing there. Then the Force Leader turned and climbed back toward us.
He stopped in front of Kensie, and saluted. “Commander,” he said, “the Commander of the Chosen Troops of God will meet with you in the field to discuss a surrender.” He stopped to draw a fresh breath. “If you’ll show yourself at the edge of the opposite woods at the same time; and you can approach the table together.”
“Thank you, Force Leader,” said Kensie. He looked past his officer at the field and the table. “I think I’ll go down.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” I said.
“Force Leader,” said Kensie. “Form your men ready, just under the crown of the slope on the back side, here. If he surrenders, I’m going to insist he come back with me to this side immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All this business without a regular call for parley may be because he wants to surrender first and break the news of it to his troops afterwards. So get your men ready. If Black intends to present his officers with an accomplished fact, we don’t want to let him down.”
“He’s not going to surrender,” I said.
“Mr. Olyn,” said Kensie, turning to me. “I suggest you go back behind the crest of the hill. The Force Leader will see you’re taken care of.”
“No,” I said. “I’m going down. If it’s a truce parley to discuss surrender terms, there’s no combat situation involved and I’ve got a perfect right to be there. If it isn’t, what’re you doing going down yourself?”
Kensie looked at me strangely for a moment.
“All right,” he said. “Come with me.”
Kensie and I turned and went down the sharply pitched slope between the trees. Our boot-soles slipped until our heels dug in, with every step downward. Coming through the lilacs I smelled the faint, sweet scent—almost gone now—of the decaying blossoms.
Across the meadow, directly in line with the table, four figures in black came forward as we came forward. One of them was Jamethon Black.
Kensie and Jamethon saluted each other.
“Commandant Black,” said Kensie.
“Yes, Commander Graeme. I am indebted to you for meeting me here,” said Jamethon.
“My duty and a pleasure, Commandant.”
“I wished to discuss the terms of a surrender.”
“I can offer you,” said Kensie, “the customary terms extended to troops in your position under the Mercenaries’ Code.”
“You misunderstand me, sir,” said Jamethon. “It was your surrender I came here to discuss.”

The flag snapped.
Suddenly I saw the men in black measuring the field here, as I had seen them the day before. They had been right where we were now.
“I’m afraid the misunderstanding is mutual, Commandant,” said Kensie. “I am in a superior tactical position and your defeat is normally certain. I have no need to surrender.”
“You will not surrender?”
“No,” said Kensie strongly.
All at once I saw the five stakes, in the position the Friendly non-coms, officers and Jamethon were now, and the stake up in front of them fallen down.
“Look out!” I shouted at Kensie—but I was far too late.
Things had already begun to happen. The Force Leader had jerked back in front of Jamethon and all five of them were drawing their side-arms. I heard the flag snap again, and the sound of its rolling seemed to go on for a long time.
For the first time then I saw a man of the Dorsai in action. So swift was Kensie’s reaction that it was eerily as if he had read Jamethon’s mind in the instant before the Friendlies began to reach for their weapons. As their hands touched their sidearms, he was already in movement forward over the table and his spring pistol was in his hand. He seemed to fly directly into the Force Leader and the two of them went down together, but Kensie kept traveling. He rolled on off the Force Leader who now lay still in the grass. He came to his knees, fired, and dived forward, rolling again.
The Groupman on Jamethon’s right went down. Jamethon and the remaining two were turned nearly full about now, trying to keep Kensie before them. The two that were left shoved themselves in front of Jamethon, their weapons not yet aimed. Kensie stopped moving as if he had run into a stone wall, came to his feet in a crouch, and fired twice more. The two Friendlies fell apart, one to each side.
Jamethon was facing Kensie now, and Jamethon’s pistol was in his hand and aimed. Jamethon fired, and a light blue streak leaped through the air, but Kensie had dropped again. Lying on his side on the grass, propped on one elbow, he pressed the firing button on his spring pistol twice.
Jamethon’s sidearm sagged in his hand. He was backed up against the table now, and he put out his free hand to steady himself against the table top. He made another effort to lift his sidearm but he could not. It dropped from his hand. He bore more of his weight on the table, half-turning around, and his face came about to look in my direction. His face was as controlled as it had ever been, but there was something different about his eyes as he looked into mine and recognized me— something oddly like the look a man gives a competitor whom he had just beaten, and who was no real threat to begin with. A little smile touched the corners of his thin lips. Like a smile of inner triumph.  
“Mr. Olyn…” he whispered. And then the life went out of his face and he fell beside the table.
Nearby explosions shook the ground under my feet. From the crest of the hill behind us the Force Leader whom Kensie had left there was firing smoke bombs between us and the Friendly side of the meadow. A gray wall of smoke was rising between us and the far hillside, to screen us from the enemy. It towered up the blue sky like some impassable barrier, and under the looming height of it, only Kensie and I were standing.
On Jamethon’s dead face there was a faint smile.
VIII
In a daze I watched the Friendly troops surrender that same day. It was the one situation in which their officers felt justified in doing so.
Not even their Elders expected subordinates to fight a situation set up by a dead Field Commander for tactical reasons unexplained to his officers. And the live troops remaining were worth more than the indemnity charges for them that the Exotics would make.
I did not wait for the settlements. I had nothing to wait for. One moment the situation on this battlefield had been poised like some great, irresistible wave above all our heads, cresting, curling over and about to break downward with an impact that would reverberate through all the worlds of Man. Now, suddenly, it was no longer above us. There was nothing but a far-flooding silence, already draining away into the records of the past.
There was nothing for me. Nothing.
If Jamethon had succeeded in killing Kensie—even if as a result he had won a practically bloodless surrender of the Exotic troops—I might have done something damaging with the incident of the truce table. But he had only tried; and died, failing. Who could work up emotion against the Friendlies for that?
I took ship back to Earth like a man walking in a dream, asking myself why.
Back on Earth, I told my editors I was not in good shape physically; and they took one look at me and believed me. I took an indefinite leave from my job and sat around the News Network Center Library, at the Hague, searching blindly through piles of writings and reference material on the Friendlies, the Dorsai and the Exotic worlds. For what? I did not know. I also watched the news dispatches from St. Marie concerning the settlement, and drank too much while I watched.
I had the numb feeling of a soldier sentenced to death for failure on duty. Then in the news dispatches came the information that Jamethon’s body would be returned to Harmony for burial; and I realized suddenly it was this I had been waiting for: The unnatural honoring by fanatics of the fanatic who with four henchmen had tried to assassinate the lone enemy commander under a truce flag. Things could still be written.
I shaved, showered, pulled myself together after a fashion and went to see my superiors about being sent to Harmony to cover the burial of Jamethon, as a wrap-up.
The congratulations of the Director of News Network, that had reached me on St. Marie earlier, stood me in good stead. It was still fresh in the minds of the men just over me. I was sent.

Five days later I was on Harmony, in a little town called Remembered-of-the-Lord. The buildings in the town were of concrete and bubble plastic, though evidently they had been up for many years. The thin, stony soil about the town had been tilled as the fields on St. Marie had been tilled when I got to that other world—for Harmony now was just entering the spring of its northern hemisphere. And it was raining as I drove from the spaceport of the town, as it had on St. Marie that first day. But the Friendly fields I saw did not show the rich darkness of the fields of St. Marie. Only a thin, hard blackness in the wet that was like the color of Friendly uniforms.
I got to the church just as people were beginning to arrive. Under the dark, draining skies, the interior of the church was almost too dim to let me see my way about—for the Friendlies permit themselves no windows and no artificial lighting in their houses of worship. Gray light, cold wind and rain entered the doorless portal at the back of the church. Through the single rectangular opening in the roof watery sunlight filtered over Jamethon’s body, on a platform set up on trestles. A transparent cover had been set up to protect the body from the rain, which was channeled off the open space and ran down a drain in the back wall. But the elder conducting the Death Service and anyone coming up to view the body was expected to stand exposed to sky and weather.
I got in line with the people moving slowly down the central aisle and past the body. To right and left of me the barriers at which the congregation would stand during the service were lost in gloom. The rafters of the steeply pitched roof were hidden in darkness. There was no music, but the low sound of voices individually praying to either side of me in the ranks of barriers and in the line blended into a sort of rhythmic undertone of sadness. Like Jamethon, the people were all very dark here, being of North African extraction. Dark into dark, they blended, and were lost about me in the gloom.
I came up and passed at last by Jamethon. He looked as I remembered him. Death had had no power to change him. He lay on his back, his hands at his sides, and his lips were as firm and straight as ever. Only his eyes were closed.
I was limping noticeably because of the dampness, and as I turned away from the body, I felt my elbow touched. I turned back sharply. I was not wearing my correspondent’s uniform. I was in civilian clothes, so as to be inconspicuous.
I looked down into the face of the young girl in Jamethon’s solidograph. In the gray rainy light her unlined face was like something from the stained glass window of an ancient cathedral back on Old Earth.
“You’ve been wounded,” she said in a soft voice to me. “You must be one of the mercenaries who knew him on Newton, before he was ordered to Harmony. His parents, who are mine as well, would find solace in the Lord by meeting you.”
The wind blew rain down through the overhead opening all about me, and its icy feel sent a chill suddenly shooting through me, freezing me to my very bones.
“No!” I said. “I’m not. I didn’t know him.” And I turned sharply away from her and pushed my way into the crowd, back up the aisle.
After about fifteen feet, I realized what I was doing and slowed down. The girl was already lost in the darkness of the bodies behind me. I made my way more slowly toward the back of the church, where there was a little place to stand before the first ranks of the barriers began. I stood watching the people come in. They came and came, walking in in their black clothing with their heads down and talking or praying in low voices.
I stood where I was, a little back from the entrance, half numbed and dull-minded with the chill about me and the exhaustion I had brought with me from Earth. The voice droned about me. I almost dozed, standing there. I could not remember why I had come.
Then a girl’s voice emerged from the jumble, bringing me back to full consciousness again.
“—he did deny it, but I am sure he is one of those mercenaries who was with Jamethon on Newton. He limps and can only be a soldier who hath been wounded.”

It was the voice of Jamethon’s sister, speaking with more of the Friendly cant on her tongue than she had used speaking to me, a stranger. I woke fully and saw her standing by the entrance only a few feet from me, half-facing two elder people who I recognized as the older couple in Jamethon’s solidograph. A bolt of pure, freezing horror shot through me.
“No!” I nearly shouted at them. “I don’t know him. I never knew him—I don’t understand what you’re talking about!” And I turned and bolted out through the entrance of the church into the concealing rain.
I all but ran for about thirty or forty feet. Then I heard no footsteps behind me; I stopped.
I was alone in the open. The day was even darker now and the rain suddenly came down harder. It obscured everything around me with a drumming, shimmering curtain. I could not even see the groundcars in the parking lot toward which I was facing; and for sure they could not see me from the church. I lifted my face up to the downpour and let it beat upon my cheeks and my closed eyelids.
“So,” said a voice from behind me. “You did not know him?”
The words seemed to cut me down the middle, and I felt as a cornered wolf must feel. Like a wolf I turned.
“Yes, I knew him!” I said.
Facing me was Padma, in a blue robe the rain did not seem to dampen. His empty hands that had never held a weapon in their life were clasped together before him. But the wolf part of me knew that as far as I was concerned, he was armed and a hunter.
“You?” I said. ‘What are you doing here?”
“It was calculated you would be here,” said Padma, softly. “So I am here, too. But why are you here, Tam? Among those people in there, there’s sure to be at least a few fanatics who’ve heard the camp rumors of your responsibility in the matter of Jamethon’s death and the Friendlies’ surrender.”
“Rumors!” I said. “Who started them?”
“You did,” Padma said. “By your actions on St. Marie.” He gazed at me. “Didn’t you know you were risking your life, coming here today?”
I opened my mouth to deny it. Then I realized I had known.
“What if someone should call out to them,” said Padma, “that Tam Olyn, the St. Marie campaign Newsman, is here incognito?”
I looked at him with my wolf-feeling, grimly.
“Can you square it with your Exotic principles if you do?”
“We are misunderstood,” answered Padma calmly. “We hire soldiers to fight for us not because of some moral commandment, but because our emotional perspective is lost if we become involved.”
There was no fear left in me. Only a hard, empty feeling.
“Then call them,” I said.
Padma’s strange, hazel eyes watched me through the rain.
“If that was all that was needed,” he said, “I could have sent word to them. I wouldn’t have needed to come myself.”
“Why did you come?” My voice tore at my throat. “What do you care about me, or the Exotics?”
“We care for every individual,” said Padma. “But we care more for the race. And you remain dangerous to it. You’re an idealist, Tam, warped to destructive purpose. There is a law of conservation of energy in the pattern of cause-and-effect as in other sciences. Your destructiveness was frustrated on St. Marie. Now it may turn inward to destroy you, or outward against the whole race of man.”
I laughed, and heard the harshness of my laughter.
“What’re you going to do about it?” I said.
“Show you how the knife you hold cuts the hand that holds it as well as what you turn it against. I have news for you, Tam. Kensie Graeme is dead.”

“Dead?” The rain seemed to roar around me suddenly and the parking lot shifted unsubstantially under my feet.
“He was assassinated by three men of the Blue Front in Blauvain five days ago.”
“Assassinated…” I whispered. “Why?”
“Because the war was over,” said Padma. “Because Jamethon’s death and the surrender of the Friendly troops without the preliminary of a war that would tear up the countryside left the civilian population favorably disposed toward our troops. Because the Blue Front found themselves farther from power than ever, as a result of this favorable feeling. They hoped by killing Graeme to provoke his troops into retaliation against the civilian population, so that the St. Marie government would have to order them home to our Exotics, and stand unprotected to face a Blue Front revolt.”
I stared at him.
“All things are interrelated,” said Padma. “Kensie was slated for a final promotion to a desk command back on Mara or Kultis. He and his brother Ian would have been out of the wars for the rest of their professional lives. Because of Jamethon’s death, that allowed the surrender of his troops without fighting, a situation was set up which led the Blue Front to assassinate Kensie. If you and Jamethon had not come together on St. Marie, and Jamethon had won, Kensie would still be alive. So our calculations show.”
“Jamethon and I?” The breath went dry in my throat without warning, and the rain came down harder.
“You were the factor,” said Padma, “that helped Jamethon to his solution.”
“I helped him!” I said. “I did?”
“He saw through you,” said Padma. “He saw through the revenge-bitter, twisted surface you thought was yourself, to the idealistic core that was so deep in the bone of you that even your uncle hadn’t been able to eradicate it.”
The rain thundered between us. But Padma’s every word came clearly through it to me.
“I don’t believe you!” I shouted. “I don’t believe he did anything like that!”
“I told you,” said Padma, “you didn’t fully appreciate the evolutionary advances of our Splinter Cultures. Jamethon’s faith was not the kind that can be shaken by outer things. If you had been in fact like your uncle, he would not even have listened to you. He would have dismissed you as a soulless man. As it was, he thought of you instead as a man possessed. A man speaking with what he would have called Satan’s voice.”
“I don’t believe it!” I yelled.
“You do believe it,” said Padma. “You’ve got no choice except to believe it. Because only because of it could Jamethon find his solution.”
“Solution!”
“He was a man ready to die for his faith. But as a commander he found it hard his men should go out to die for no other reasonable cause.” Padma watched me, and the rain thinned for a moment. “But you offered him what he recognized as the devil’s choice—his life in this world, if he would surrender his faith and his men, to avoid the conflict that would end in his death and theirs.”
“What crazy thinking was that?” I said. Inside the church, the praying had stopped, and a single strong, deep voice was beginning the burial service.
“Not crazy,” said Padma. “The moment he realized this, his answer became simple. All he had to do was begin by denying whatever the Satan offered. He must start with the absolute necessity of his own death.”
“And that was a solution?” I tried to laugh but my throat hurt.
“It was the only solution,” said Padma. “Once he decided that, he saw immediately that the one situation in which his men would permit themselves to surrender was if he was dead and they were in an untenable position for reasons only he had known.”
I felt the words go through me with a soundless shock.
“But he didn’t mean to die!” I said.
“He left it to his God,” said Padma. “He arranged it so only a miracle could save him.”
“What’re you talking about?” I stared at him. “He set up a table with a flag of truce. He took four men—”
“There was no flag. The men were overage, martyrdom-seekers.”
“He took four!” I shouted. “Four and one made five. The five of them against one man. I stood there by that table and saw. Five against—”
“Tam.”

The single word stopped me. Suddenly I began to be afraid. I did not want to hear what he was about to say. I was afraid I knew what he was going to tell me. That I had known it for some time. And I did not want to hear it, I did not want to hear him say it. The rain grew even stronger, driving upon us both and mercilessly on the concrete, but I heard every word relentlessly through all its sound and noise.
Padma’s voice began to roar in my ears like the rain, and a feeling came over me like the helpless floating sensation that comes in high fever. “Did you think that Jamethon for a minute fooled himself? He was a product of a Splinter Culture. He recognized another in Kensie. Did you think that for a minute he thought that barring a miracle he and four overage fanatics could kill an armed, alert and ready man of the Dorsai—a man like Kensie Graeme? Before they were gunned down and killed themselves?”
Themselves… themselves… themselves…
I rode off a long way on that word from the dark day and the rain. Like the rain and the wind behind the clouds it lifted me and carried me away at last to that high, hard and stony land I had glimpsed when I had asked Kensie Graeme that question about his ever allowing Friendly prisoners to be killed. It was this land I had always avoided, but to it I was come at last.
And I remembered…
From the beginning, I had known inside myself that the fanatic who had killed Dave and the others was not the image of all Friendlies.
Jamethon was no casual killer. I had tried to make him into one in order to hide my own shame, my own self-destruction. For three years I had lied to myself. It had not been with me as I claimed, at Dave’s death. 
I had sat there under that tree watching Dave and the others die, watching the black-clad Groupman killing them with his machine rifle. And, in that moment, the thought in my mind had not been the one with which I justified three years of hunting for an opportunity to ruin someone like Jamethon and destroy the Friendly peoples.
It had not been me, thinking, what is he doing there, what is he doing to those helpless, innocent men! I had thought nothing so noble. Only one thought had filled all my mind and body in that instant. It had been simply—after he’s done, is he going to turn that gun on me?

I came back to the day and to the rain. The rain was slackening and Padma was holding me upright. As with Jamethon, I was amazed at the strength of his hands.
“Let me go,” I mumbled.
“Where would you go, Tam?” said Padma.
“Any place,” I muttered. “I’ll get out of it. I’ll go hole up somewhere and get out of it. I’ll give up.”
“An action,” said Padma, letting me go, “goes on reverberating for ever. Cause never ceases its effects. You can’t let go now, Tam. You can only change sides.”
“Sides!” I said. The rain was dwindling fast. “What sides?” I stared at him drunkenly.
“Your uncle’s side which is one,” said Padma. “And the opposing side, which is yours—which is ours as well.” The rain was falling only lightly now, and the day was lightening. A little pale sunlight worked through thin clouds and illuminated the space between us. “In addition there are two strong influences besides we Exotics concerned with the attempt of man to evolve. We can’t calculate or understand them yet, beyond the fact they act almost as single powerful individual wills. One seems to try to aid, one to frustrate, the evolutionary process; and their influences can be traced back at least as far as man’s first venture into space from Earth.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t understand it,” I muttered. “It’s not my business.”
“It is. It has been all your life.” Padma’s eyes caught light for a moment. “A force intruded on the pattern on St. Marie, in the shape of a unit warped by personal loss and oriented toward violence. That was you, Tam.”
I tried to shake my head again, but I knew he was right.
“You are blocked in your effort,” said Padma. “But the law of conservation of energies could not be denied. When you were frustrated by Jamethon, your force, transmuted, left the pattern in the unit of another individual, warped by personal loss and oriented toward violent effect on the fabric.”
I stared at him and wet my lips. “What other individual?”
“Ian Graeme.”
I stared at him.
“Ian found his brother’s three assassins hiding in a hotel room in Blauvain. He killed them with his hands—and in doing that he calmed the mercenaries and frustrated the Blue Front. But then he resigned and went home to the Dorsai. He’s charged now with the sense of loss and bitterness you were charged with when you came to St. Marie.” Padma paused and added softly, “Now he has great causal potential for some purpose we can’t yet calculate.”
“But—” I looked at Padma. “You mean I’m free!”
Padma shook his head.
“You’re only charged with a different force instead,” he said. “You received the full impact and charge of Jamethon’s self-sacrifice.”
He looked at me almost with sympathy, and in spite of the sunlight I began to shiver.
It was so. I could not deny it. Jamethon, in giving his life up for a belief, when I had thrown away all belief before the face of death, had melted and changed me as lightning melts and changes the uplifted sword-blade that it strikes. I could not deny what had happened to me.
“No,” I said, shivering, “I can’t do anything about it.”
“You can,” said Padma, calmly. “You will.”
He unclasped his hands that he had held together earlier.
“The purpose for which we calculated I should meet you here is accomplished now,” he said. “The idealism which was basic in you remains. Even your uncle couldn’t take it from you. He could only attack it so that the threat of death on New Earth could twist it for a while against itself. Now you’ve been hammered straight in the forge of events on St. Marie.”
I laughed, and the laugh hurt my throat still.
“I don’t feel straight,” I said.
“Give yourself time,” said Padma. “Healing takes time. New growth has to harden, like muscle, before it becomes useful. Now you understand much more about the faith of the Friendlies, the courage of the Dorsai—and something of the philosophical strength for man we work toward on the Exotics.”
He stopped and smiled at me. Almost an impish smile.
“It should have been clear to you a long while ago, Tam,” he said. “Your job’s the job of translator—between the old and the new. Your work will prepare the minds of the people on all the worlds—full-spectrum and Splinter Culture alike—for the day when the talents of the race will combine into the new breed.” The smile softened, his face saddened. “You’ll live to see more of it than I. Good-by, Tam.”
He turned. Through the still misty, but brightening air, I saw him walking alone toward the church, from which came the voice of the speaker within, now announcing the number of the final hymn.

Dazedly, I turned away myself, went to my car and got in. Now the rain was almost over and the sky was brightening fast. The faint moisture fell, it seemed, more kindly; and the air was fresh and new.
I put the car windows open as I pulled out of the lot onto the long road back to the spaceport. And through the open window beside me I heard them beginning to sing the final hymn inside the church.
It was the Battle Hymn of the Friendly Soldiers that they sang. As I drove away down the road the voices seemed to follow me strongly. Not sounding slowly and mournfully as if in sadness and farewell, but strongly and triumphantly, as in a marching song on the lips of those taking up a route at the beginning of a new day.
Soldier, ask not—now, or ever, 
Where to war your banners go.
The singing followed me as I drove away. And as I got farther into the distance, the voices seemed to blend until they sounded like one voice alone, powerfully singing. Ahead, the clouds were breaking. With the sun shining through, the patches of blue sky were like bright flags waving—like the banners of an army, marching forever forward into lands unknown.
I watched them, as I drove forward toward where they blended into open sky; and for a long time I heard the singing behind me, as I drove to the spaceport and the ship for Earth that waited in the sunlight.