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Chapter Twenty-Six

AS Drake closed the door of the conference room, Jeff heard a buzz of rising voices sounding through it. All his aunts and uncles seemed to be shouting at once.

"Were you saying what I thought you were saying?" Jeff could see that his uncle was trembling, and his face was white. "You control Kopal Transportation?"

"For the moment I do. But it's not giving me any pleasure." Drake took a long, deep breath. "My God, Jeff, I hated that. I'd forgotten what Giles can be like when things don't go his way. So civilized on the surface, and so vicious underneath."

"Are you all right?"

"Not yet. Give me a few minutes." Drake started forward through the antechambers that led out to the stone-paved corridor. "It's strange," he said softly. "I've never wanted to run the company, and I don't want to do it now. But when I saw Giles and the others ready to steal control, I just had to do something. As soon as I can, I'll halt all board actions. I can do that as major stockholder. That will hold things until you get the navy hearing behind you and are old enough to vote your own stock."

"But I don't want to run the company! I'd be no good at it. I'm not a military man, or a businessman. I want to be a jinner, or a scientist."

"Good choices. That's the awful thing. The only people you can trust to run the biggest transportation company in the solar system are people who won't misuse power. And they don't want the job. While people like Giles, who want the position so much they'd die for it, mustn't be allowed to have it."

They had reached the corridor and were hurrying toward the front doors. The whole house seemed unnaturally quiet. The staff would all be down in the basement levels or in the manor kitchens.

"So what happens next?" Jeff asked. The confrontation was over, but Drake still seemed awfully nervous and depressed.

"I'm having second thoughts about coming here at all. I wouldn't have, except I knew Giles. I suspected he was planning some sneaky move. I told Connie, and she said to be careful, it might get nasty. I didn't really believe her. I thought, after all, it's our own family. But now I do."

"We have to leave?"

"Fast."

"Why? Giles and the others know they don't have a chance. They lost, and you control Kopal Transportation."

"True, and that fact must be sinking into them. But it won't take Giles more than ten minutes to draw another conclusion: If I were dead, which he thought I was until half an hour ago, he'd be back in the game."

"You don't honestly think he'd try something like that?"

But Jeff did not need an answer from Drake. It was provided by a memory of the dark face with its knotted jaw muscles, and the soft voice saying: "You were handed on a plate what anyone else would kill to get."

"I don't know what he'll do. He might try anything. Giles likes to win." Drake spoke jerkily. After his slow start he was running, so fast that Jeff could scarcely keep up. "We have to get away from here. And I ought to be locked up for allowing you into a situation like this."

They were approaching the front doors, where a man lounged against one of the flanking pillars. Jeff felt a tingle of horror. They were too late, the way out was blocked, Giles had been too smart and too fast for them. Then he realized that the man was Uncle Lory.

His uncle nodded pleasantly and said to Drake, "I thought I saw you earlier, but I wasn't sure. You were away for a long time, weren't you?"

"I was indeed." Drake was trying to sound normal, but Jeff could hear the tremor in his voice. "How are you, Lory?"

"I am fine. Drake, were you in space? They said you went there."

"Yes, I was in space. And I have to go there again."

"That must be wonderful."

"Lory, we will talk about it some other time, as much as you want." Drake's voice was gentle, masking his tension. "Right now, Jeff and I have to leave. Quickly."

"Florence left in a hurry, too. She said she was going to space."

"We are in even more of a hurry than Florence."

"It's nighttime now."

"I know. But we can't wait for morning, we have to be on our way at once. Jeff and I will start running, but we will need an aircar to come and pick us up. We have to call a service."

"I can do that," Jeff said quickly. He wasn't sure that Uncle Lory was up to making such a call, and at last he had something to do other than stand around and gape. "The service numbers are in the data bank."

But Lory was frowning at them, standing in their way as they tried to get to the front door. "I suppose if you don't want to take one of the family cars, out back . . . ."

Drake glanced at Lory, then gave Jeff a strange look. Jeff was convinced that it meant, What sort of an idiot are you, Jeff Kopal, who doesn't know what's in his own house? until Drake said, "I could say it's my nerves, but it's actually my stupidity. I live here for eighteen years, and I don't remember a thing about the place."

They had all three turned and were hurrying toward the rear door of the manor. "Do you think we'll find one ready to fly?" Drake asked.

"Mine," Lory said promptly. "It will be ready, it always is."

"Lory's right," Jeff added. "His car is kept in tip-top shape, and it's always ready. The car's your pride and joy, isn't it, Uncle Lory?"

"It is." Lory beamed for a moment, then he shook his head. "Of course, they won't let me fly it. I think I know how, but they won't let me."

As they left the house and started toward the garage hanger, Jeff felt an irresistible urge to turn and look back. The whole rear of the house was quiet, with not a light showing. Would Giles come after them in darkness, trying to stop them leaving? Surely not.

The hangar door was open. Jeff, hurrying toward Lory's gleaming aircar, decided that he had too much imagination. Not even Uncle Giles would attempt something so direct.

He followed Drake into the car. Lory climbed in after them. Jeff, about to tell him to get out, saw his uncle's excited face and changed his mind. This was Lory's aircar, his most cherished possession. He at least ought to get a ride in it.

"Ready?" Drake was in the pilot's seat, and the motor was already humming.

"Ready." Jeff closed the sliding door and settled in the rear seat next to Lory.

"Hold tight then. We're not going to hang about."

The car left the hanger, turned, and shot forward with a great burst of acceleration. Within forty yards it was close to airborne, wheels skimming along the smooth lawn. Jeff took one last look at the house. There was a light now, shining from the open back door. He thought he saw a man's shape, outlined in the doorway. A flash of violet light across the ground came and went almost too quickly to see.

The car lurched and dipped for a moment to one side.

"Left wheel of the undercarriage gone," Drake said. Now that he had something physical to do, he seemed totally calm. "Good thing we have plenty of lift. We're going straight up—I hope."

The car was clear of the ground, rushing nose-high into the night sky. Jeff saw another flash of pale violet, but it passed far beneath them.

"One thing you have to say for Giles." Drake was taking them up in a steep, banking curve, away from the dark bulk of Kopal Manor. "When he chases something, he chases it all the way."

"What did he chase?" Lory asked.

"I meant that he wants to run Kopal Transportation."

"Oh. What a dull thing to want."

"I agree with you. Hey." Drake was examining the controls of the aircar. "This shows a second set of engines, and they're not for an air-breathing mode. Can this car go orbital?"

"It's supposed to be able to," Lory said.

"It must have cost a fortune."

"Not by Kopal standards." Jeff felt his spirits rising as the car soared and Kopal Manor vanished far behind. "You were away for too long, Drake. You've forgotten what it's like. When you're a Kopal and it comes to transportation systems, you have nothing but the best."

"Then orbital it will be. With Giles on the warpath, we don't want to mess around on Earth longer than we have to. I'll feel a lot safer when we are outside the atmosphere."

He touched the control board, and the nose of the aircar tilted farther. Jeff felt himself pressed back harder into his seat.

"Do you mean it?" Lory turned to Jeff. "You're going to space, and you're taking me with you?"

"That's right, Uncle Lory." Under Drakes guidance the car was moving faster and faster. The sun was visible, rising again around the curve of the earth.

"I can't wait to get there." Lory's face glowed in the light of a new dawn. "You've been to space. Is it really as good and exciting as people tell you it is?"

"No, it's not."

For the past few hours Jeff had been controlled by others, with no more say in where he went or what he did than a wasp trapped inside a jar. But finally he had a question that he could answer, without consulting Drake or anyone else.

He thought of the network nodes, glimmering opalescent bubbles providing transfer points to distant parts of the universe; he remembered Hooglich and Russo, speaking of Diabelli Omnivore drives and Anadem fields in tones normally reserved for a religious experience; he recalled the eight-armed, bottle-bodied Logans, perpetually frustrated by and patient with human frailties and failures of logic; he saw in his mind the Messina Dust Cloud, that vast tapestry woven by twisting rivers of dust and glowing gas, with the space sounders coming and going as they chose, moving in mysterious ways across the Cloud's broad face; he recalled the monstrous wheel of the Galaxy, seen from so far away that a hundred billion suns merged into a single bright image. Last of all he remembered Lilah, hanging in free fall, babbling relentlessly of horses, and making Jeff swear that he would one day return to the Cloud.

"Space isn't as good as people tell you," Jeff said. "Uncle Lory, it's much, much better."

THE END

 

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Framed