CHAPTER XXI
A dozen men clad in white uniforms of the S-Council surrounded them, and there were weapons in their hands.
Senior Quadrate Blair understood. Partially, he understood. He had been reading a banner headline, and then suddenly—suddenly there had been an indescribable moment of utter dark, of awful timelessness—and cold. And there was still the cold, tangible and fluorescing in a green-blue flame about him. Through it he could see the white blurs—the men in white. S-men....
"Lisa—" He felt her beside him, crushing their two sons to her trembling body. He could see their faces, then—upturned to his, pleading, afraid. "The change. Somehow my counterpart, my imposing alter-ego has succeeded, Lisa! He has found his way back, and in so doing he has returned the four of us...."
And then the green glow and the cold was gone, and there was no more time to speak.
"Stand where you are! You have only to move to—Madame Blair!"
The leader of the white-uniformed band had half-succeeded in masking his initial amazement, but now the surprise on his heavy face was a naked thing. The others stood as statues to each side of him.
There was an awful moment of silence, and the weapon-muzzles held steady, even if the dozen hands that gripped them were momentarily incapable of flexing trigger-fingers.
And then the Senior Quadrate had found his full voice.
"There has of course been some error. S-men do not enter the home of a Senior Quadrate—"
And Lisa's voice cut across her husband's.
"They—Douglas, these aren't—aren't S-men! I recognize him—the leader! Mylor Kuun...."
"Of course, Madame," the heavy-faced one said rapidly. "The disguises—a desperate necessity, I assure you. There is very little time, however. Once informed of your escape from the hospital, and of the Senior Quadrate's violation of arrest, it was necessary to act at once to find you. Genuine S-squads cannot be much behind us. We're but one of a number of our groups in the search, and we came to your home only so no possibility might be overlooked. Yet I don't understand—" For a moment a look of puzzled doubt flickered on the underground leader's heavy features. His nervous gaze touched the strange array of forbidden equipment which but moments before had been bathed in the green-blue glow.
"There will be time for explanations later!" Lisa said. She caught herself as she was about to add that what the agent was saying made little sense.
She put a protective arm around each of her still, frightened children. There must be great trouble or the group would not have so brazenly exposed itself, and come here to her home. Something desperate enough so that added confusion might serve only to make a dangerous situation an impossible one.
"But I don't—you said violation of arrest," her husband was saying stubbornly. "I demand a thorough—"
"Your lives are in danger, sir. If we do not move immediately, it will very probably be not at all. Gundar Tayne is relentless, and is reported enroute from Venus to join this search himself."
"Tayne!" Blair's face blanched, then reddened. "The Taynes, you mean! Gundar and Larsen, with Larsen behind it—"
"Sir? You're being tracked down for—they say, for murdering Larsen. Please follow us sir, Madame...." The look of puzzled bewilderment deepened on the underground leader's face as he motioned his men in screening flanks surrounding the four. One of the men handed him a white bundle from a compact equipment-pack on his back.
"You had better get these on. We would say we have captured your boys—"
They were S-Council uniforms, and the Quadrate and his wife donned them quickly; Blair doing so more in hesitant imitation of Lisa's frantic haste than from the desperation of a situation which he only half-understood.
Murdered Larsen Tayne? Then ... yes of course. The other Blair. But why should the other Blair hate Tayne so? He was of a different Earth, of course.... He would think like those of his own world. He would hate all this world stood for. Hate Tayne for his overbearing, brutish use of authority—criminal cleverness at deception.
Suddenly, he knew the confusion of panic for the first time in his life. Suddenly, his mind was a boiling thing, and all the brilliant solutions that had been forming in it with split-second rapidity were inexplainably invalid, wrong....
And then they were at a half-run, leaving the house, heading for a 'copter painted with the S-Council insigne, counterfeit serial code-numbers beneath it.
In moments, the craft was airborne, and Washington was falling away below them, fading away behind. And now any small thing—an incorrectly acknowledged radio challenge—would undo them, the Quadrate realized, but that was only a part of this terrible gamble they were taking. Gamble, on their very lives, yes—only why? Why?
Slowly, bit by bit, the thing pieced itself together as they flew. A great forest stretched ten miles beneath them, faded, wilted at last into desert as the first shadows of a day dying crept silently upward to engulf them.
In low tones, he and Lisa talked with the heavy-faced leader, and they talked for a long time.
"If it were not for the boys—" Blair murmured finally.
"The boys will be safe with us," Lisa answered. She looked at them, and they were sleeping, hardly looking the part now of young warriors of broadsword and mace. "We will teach them a different way...."
He was silent for long moments. Then: "I cannot understand. I cannot, Lisa. That I have always believed as I have—and he, as we know he did. Yet that we should both have mortal hatred for the same men; he to the point of doing what I did not have courage to do. And now, regardless of what I believe, my own kind are hunting me down."
"They would have, had you had the courage of which you speak—the courage of that conviction. And was it, Douglas, simply a conviction about a single man?"
"I—I don't know." He looked through a port; it was night, and they were speeding silently westward. Then he was looking back to her, and deep into her eyes. He had never felt lost, alone, hunted before. There was something very wrong.
"With us, Douglas ... will you try? To understand—with us?"
"Not because I am hunted."
"No. No. But now is the time for that wanting courage. Another man, too, hated a Tayne, and killed him. Can you help us kill the things that all Taynes stood for? In our way?"
Great mountains were looming before them, and the 'copter was beginning to lower into their darkened maw. And suddenly he felt a new strength in him from depths of his being that were opening to him for the first time. Another man had killed Tayne. And could he—
"But what of the other man?" he suddenly heard himself asking. "What have I done to him? What have I done to his world?"
"He must be a man of great courage." Lisa answered slowly. "I think—I think such a man will find a way to undo what you have done. For such a man, and for such others as he, there is always great hope."
"You will help me, Lisa."
"All of us, Douglas."
"Then that is all I shall need," he said softly.
The 'copter vanished into the mountains.
Terry and Mike came running from Doug's den, a welter of books open on the floor behind them which they had not opened.
Dot was coming from her bedroom. A pistol Doug owned had been in her hand, and she put it in its place in the open drawer from which she had taken it.
"Dot! Kids—the living-room, I'm in the living-room! Dot!"
In a moment they were around him, and they were the Dot and the Mike and the Terry whose faces had been so familiar so long ago.
"I must've—he—I must've been reading this final—look, Dot, my God look—"
She saw the Page One streamer.
"Then he was—he was trying, here, he was trying, Doug.... That was why. When I arrived, I had a pistol in my hand...."
The headline read BLAIR BILL GOES TO HOUSE TOMORROW. And in the three-column drop beneath it: Unanimous Passage Seen—Senate Reported Favorable—President Says He'll Sign Immediately—Draft Of 13's Would Begin Nov. 15—Soviet Terms Measure 'Fantastic.'
"Doug—"
"He's begun it all right. How, I don't know, unless—And beneath the centerfold he read CLERGY LAUDS BLAIR BILL AT PARLEY HERE.
"Had them falling for it, had 'em mainlined all the way!" Doug said.
And then he was going swiftly toward the den, almost at a run.
He pulled a battered chair up to the big desk, lifted his telephone from its cradle almost in a single motion.
Quietly, Dot shut the door behind him. It would be a long time, she knew, before it would open again.