That was it, of course—the cellar. That was what had thrown them off, confused their logic. Through some quirk of coincidence, the other Blair, Senior Quadrate Blair and his wife had been in their cellar at the time of the switch. Had they been anywhere else—anywhere else at all, even just upstairs, the mistake in logic would not have been made. And if Madame Blair had no sons, Terry and Mike would not have been transmitted at all. But Quadrate and Madame Blair had had sons. Two, ten years old. He remembered when Tayne had told him of their transfer from his quadrant to Tayne's own.... Ordered by Gundar Tayne, Director. He remembered. He remembered how thankful he had been that they had not been his. But now—now, fantastically, they were. Because when the switch happened, Ronal and Kurt Blair had not been in the cellar. They had been on Venus.
But it was too much, the coincidences—the marriage of two counterparts; their children, same sex, same age.
And then he remembered what he had told Grayson so terribly long ago. There's a million possible results when you go fooling around with the structure of the universe, Carl ...
Thousands of voices in the universe that were exact echoes of each other. But Terry and Mike were here, and there was no doubting that. And in Tayne's quadrate, the one beside which he was even now marching. Oh, he was doing well with his thinking! He had narrowed the field down to a trifling two hundred fifty thousand!
And he knew that by any direct means that would not arouse Tayne's too-willing suspicion, it was as far down as he would narrow it.
Indirect, then.... Somehow, through Tayne himself, perhaps. Tayne had his boys. Tayne's brother had seen to that, with of course no reason given. Pressure—simple pressure. Doug wondered if the pressure was supposed to break him. He wondered what Tayne's reaction would be—and his brother's—if it did not. Easy enough to guess. If his sons' deaths at Tayne's careful arrangement were not enough to break him, shatter him, make him throw down his office, then the corpses of Kurt and Ronal—Terry and Mike—would somehow end up on the battle area occupied by his quadrant, far enough behind the front lines of fighting to convince any martial court that he had violated the Director's order, had obviously at the last moment brought his sons back within his own quadrant, where they might be in some measure protected.
That was how it would be. If the pressure was not enough, then a simple frame. A simple matter of good timing. Yet if the timing should, by some miracle, go wrong....
If the timing went wrong! God there it was!
Suddenly, the blood was pounding through his body, throbbing in the large veins at his throat. Five minutes more and this thing would end. Three hundred seconds, four hundred strides. Then the final salute as the Prelate General left as he had come. And then thirty minutes for deployment, and the games on the northern mass would begin.