"You might as well be for all the sense you're talking."
"All right, Lee." He looked wounded and brave.
"Oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Edward—" She studied his face with suddenly-narrowed eyes and her tone changed. "Listen, you old devil, you're not fooling me for a minute. I couldn't hurt your feelings with the blunt edge of an axe. You're not talking me into anything. It'd just be sending somebody to his death. Besides, they were both accidents." She turned and began to fiddle with a semi-circular screen whose focus was a large and complicated chair. Three synchronized projectors bore on the screen.
The old man said very softly: "And what if they weren't? Tom McGurn and Bob were good men. None better. If the damn Government's knocking us off one by one, something ought to be done. And you seem to be the only person in a position to do it."
"Start a war," she said bitterly. "Sweep them from the seas. Wasn't Dick Reiner chanting that when I was in diapers?"
"Yes," the old man brooded. "And he's still chanting it now that you're in—whatever young ladies wear nowadays. Promise me something, Lee. If there's another try, will you help us out?"
"I am so sure there won't be," she said, "that I'll promise. And God help you, Edward, if you try to fake one. I've told you before and I tell you now that it's almost certain death."
Charles Orsino studied himself in a three-way mirror.
The evening suit was new; he wished the gunbelt was. The holster rode awkwardly on his hip; he hadn't got a new outfit since his eighteenth birthday and his chest had filled out to the last hole of the cross-strap's buckle since then. Well, it would have to wait; the evening would cost him enough as it was. Five bodyguards! He winced at the thought. But you had to be seen at these things and you had to do it right or it didn't count.