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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 tabletop. 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
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mine and recognized me-something oddly like the look a man gives a competitor
whom he has just beaten and who was no real threat to begin with. A little
smile touched the corners of his thin lips. Like the smile of inner triumph.
"Mr. Olyn," he whispered. And then the life went out of his fece 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.
Chapter 29
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 Services 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
about arrangements for passage to Harmony to cover the burial of Jamethon as a
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wrap-up.
The congratulations of Piers and word of my appointment to the Guild
Council-that had reached me on St. Marie earlier-stood me in good stead. It
got me a high-priority seat on the first spaceliner out.
Five days later I was on Harmony in that same little town, called
Remembered-of-the-Lord, where Eldest Bright had taken me once before. The
buildings in the town were still of concrete and bubble-plastic, unchanged by
three years. But the stony soil of the farms 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 shown 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 New Earth, 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
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