The whisper trailed off into a dry rattle, then silence. The jaw fell open. The head slumped forward. Clawly caught it, palm to white forehead, and let it gently down on to the desk, where the groping fingers had traced a black, crisscross pattern.
Over it, Clawly's eyes, and those of the other Thorn, met.
XII.
The coup d'etat may appear in a thousand different guises. The prudent ruler suspects even his own shadow.
de Etienne
The Sky Room of the Opal Cross was so altered it was hard to believe it had been a festivities center only three days ago. The World Map and Space Map still held their dominating positions, but the one was dotted with colored pictorial symbols indicating the location of spaceports and space-yards, defense installations, armament fabrication and conversion centers, regular and emergency power stations, field headquarters, and like military information, while the Space Map, in which a system of perspective realistically conveyed three-dimensional depth, was similarly dotted in the Marsward sector to indicate the real or hypothetic location of spacecraft. This latter map emphasized with chilling clarity the fact that Earth had nothing at all in the way of an interplanetary battle fleet, only a scattering of unarmed or lightly armed exploratory craft that now, by stretching a point, could be counted as scouts. While fanning out from Mars in a great hemisphere, hypothetic but none the less impressive, loomed a vast armada.
The rest of the Sky Room was filled with terraced banks of televisor panels, transmission boards, plotting tables, and various calculating machines, all visible from the central control table around which they crowded. One whole sector was devoted to other military installations and specialized headquarters in the Opal Cross. Other sectors linked the control table with field headquarters, observation centers, spacecraft, and so on.
But now all the boards and tables, save the central one, were unoccupied. The calculating machines were untended and inoperative. And the massed rows of televisor panels were all blank gray—as pointless as a museum with empty cases.
A similar effect of bewildered deflation was apparent in most of the faces of the World Executive Committee around the control table. The exceptions included Chairman Shielding, who looked very angry, though it was a grave anger and well under control; Conjerly and Tempelmar, completely and utterly impassive; Clawly, also impassive, but with the suggestion that it would only take a hairtrigger touch to release swift speech or action; and Firemoor, who, sitting beside Clawly, was plainly ill at ease—pale, nervous, and sweating.
Shielding, on his feet, was explaining why the Sky Room had been cleared of its myriad operators and clerks. His voice was as cuttingly realistic as a spray of ice water.