to spot in a crowd, and he didn’t take any trouble to conceal either himself or his purpose.
I didn’t like that. I didn’t care for being watched so closely, but even more I didn’t care for the carelessly blatant way it was done. It became a kind of insult—almost an intimidation. I had complained once, but the way the complaint was received had simply supplemented the insult. Zarnecki—Philip’s right-hand man and the one who seemed to hand out all the orders—had simply said that it was for our protection. When I’d expressed a desire to be responsible for my own protection he’d said—very smoothly—that we were on his world and that he and Philip were responsible, and that there was no way he could square it with his own conscience to let us roam around unprotected. He hadn’t used precisely those words, but that had been the gist of his meaning.
I didn’t like Zarnecki. I didn’t like any of them, but Zarnecki least of all. He was tall and slim, olive-skinned and black-haired but with strangely colored eyes—deep blue around the pupil’s rim shading to gray-brown at the iris’s extremity. He gave the impression of being extremely fond of himself while not thinking too highly of others—any others.
He was, of course, fairly closely related to Philip. Just about every member of the upper crust—whether they lived in the house or elsewhere—was a cousin a couple of times removed. I got the impression the aristocracy had been formed entirely by the marrying of the early Wildeblood children. James had had four—two of each.
I generally thought of Zarnecki as the opposition, although I wasn’t really sure we had grounds for conflict with Philip’s coterie—not, at any rate, grounds which Nathan and standing orders would recognize. Zarnecki was the front man—the executive arm of the dictatorial clique. It was him who set the men to watch us and report our every move, even though he acted in Philip’s name and, undoubtedly, with Philip’s full approval.
It was, therefore, Zarnecki I cursed as the blond youth ambled along the dirt road in my wake. In the early days I had occasionally stopped and let my shadow catch up, hoping that the irony of the gesture might discourage them. But it didn’t. The closer they got, the better they seemed to like it. So now I let them keep the full distance of their ungenerous discretion.
Pete Rolving and Karen Karelia were aboard the Daedalus, having been appointed to look after the baby for the duration. Nathan and I were staying at the house—guests of the State—and other members of the expedition—Mariel, Conrad and Linda —had gone to the mainland on a special project. Unlike Floria and Dendra, where we’d previously called, Poseidon had intelligent indigenes. Mariel had gone out to exercise her special talents and make contact.
Pete and Karen were both up and about when I got there—he overstaying the end of one shift and she up early for another. They kept the routine religiously, with what seemed to me to be ridiculous untiring devotion to the letter of their duty. Karen, I knew, would have been grateful for a chance to get out and into whatever action there might be, but with the personnel shortage there was little chance. Pete didn’t mind. He got separation anxiety if he stepped outside the airlock.
Pete made me a cup of coffee. It was one thing that the colonists didn’t have and didn’t have any reasonable substitute for.
“I contacted the bad guys last night,” I told them. “Or the good guys, depending on whether or not you’re a Robin Hood fan.”
“How?” asked Pete.
“Slipped out after dark. Met him in the cemetery in response to his hoarsely whispered invitation. Cloak-and-dagger all the way. He’s a dead ringer for Cyrano de Bergerac, but he also plays guitar.”
“And you signed an agreement in blood, no doubt?” contributed Karen.
“Not exactly,” I replied. “I wasn’t in my best conspiratorial mood. Couldn’t really enter into the spirit of the thing. But he tried hard. Gave me a message in code.”
They didn’t know whether to believe me. I took out the piece of paper and showed them. I also had the package and I dropped that on the table too.
“What’s that?” asked Pete.
“I don’t know yet.”
Karen studied the numbers on the piece of paper. Pete peered over her shoulder.
They went: 688668.585775.971875.7.74.679234.1145874.16831. 598589966.
“Not exactly a long message, is it?” she said.
“That’s just a sample,” I told her. “He says we might get the rest if we crack it.”
“And how are we supposed to crack it without the rest?” asked Pete. “How the hell can we do a frequency analysis with only nine words—if they are words? Could be a string of telephone numbers for all we know. Or co-ordinates. Map reference to Treasure Island.”
I shrugged. “You two have damn all to do all day,” I said. “Take copies and start thinking. Use your intuition.”
It wasn’t really true that they had nothing to do. In fact, they had all the boring work that Nathan and I begged out of on account of being in the field—collating the data we brought in, storing it in the computer, analyzing samples I picked up virtually everywhere I went—soil, crops, blood, and less p1easant things. Nobody really had so much free time that they could spend hours at a time staring at a row of figures and hoping for a blinding flash of insight. The wandering minstrel had hinted that his cronies had spent a good deal of their time working at the whole thing without any significant inspiration. The fact that they were ill-educated didn’t really handicap them all that much. They knew the alphabet.
But Pete took a couple of copies anyhow. It didn’t take long.
The airlock alarm sounded again, and Karen went to let Nathan in. He’d come back at my signal, to check with me before he went about the day’s business.
“Your shadow keeping mine company?” I asked, as he came in.
He shook his head. “I rode out in the carriage,” he said. “With Miranda. She’s my guardian angel for today. We’re going to Farina.”
Farina was an island to the south, one of about forty in the archipelago that had a significant settlement. I’d only seen six so far, and Nathan had visited about the same number. If there were any dread secrets that Philip wanted kept, there were plenty of hiding places.
“Can you get some soil samples?” I asked him. “And sea-water close to the shore? The usual?”
He nodded. He leaned forward and picked up the paper from the table. He glanced at it idly, expecting it to be nothing worthy of his attention, but suddenly snatched it up in surprise.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” I said. “The guy with the guitar playing in the market yesterday—he asked me to meet him last night. I got out of the house okay and met him in the cemetery. He gave me that—also a packet of some foul-tasting white powder. He’s playing his cards close to his chest but I think there’s something significant in it somewhere.”
“I’ll bet there is,” he muttered, still looking at the numbers. “Who is he?”
“He didn’t give his name. But he’s no friend of Philip’s. I guess he’s as close to opposition as we’re likely to find. A
