Anywhen by James Blish Read Free Book Online Page A

longer needed tests to make up his mind what the Fomentor was.
    "I would not expect you to understand it," Valkol said in a very soft voice indeed. "It is a matter of style."
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Simon was moved to a comfortable apartment and left alone, for well more than the three hours he had asked for. By that time, his bodily reorganization was complete, though it would take at least a day for all the residual mental effects of the serum to vanish. When the Traitor-in-Chief finally admitted himself to the apartment, he made no attempt to disguise either his amazement or his admiration.
    "The poison man! High Earth is still a world of miracles. Would it be fair to ask what you did with your, uh, overpopulated associate?"
    "I disposed of him," Simon said. "We have traitors enough already. There is your document; I wrote it out by hand, but you can have toposcope confirmation whenever you like now."
    "As soon as my technicians master the new equipment —we shot the monster, of course, though I don't doubt the Exarch will resent it."
    "When you see the rest of the material, you may not care what the Exarch thinks," Simon said. "You will find that I've brought you a high alliance—though it was Gro's own horns getting it to you."
    "I had begun to suspect as much. Mr. De Kuyl—I must assume you are still he, for sanity's sake—that act of surrender was the most elegant gesture I have ever seen. That alone convinced me that you were indeed the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth, and no other."
    "Why, so I was," Simon said. "But if you will excuse me now, I think I am about to become somebody else."
    With a mixture of politeness and alarm, Valkol left him. It was none too soon. He had a bad taste in his mouth which had nothing to do with his ordeals . . . and, though nobody knew better than he how empty all vengeance is, an inexpungeable memory of Jillith.
    Maybe, he thought, "Justice is Love," after all—not a matter of style but of spirit. He had expected all these questions to vanish when the antidote took full hold, wiped into the past with the personalities who had done what they had done, but they would not vanish; they were himself.
    He had won, but obviously he would never be of use to High Earth again.

    In a way, this suited him. A man did not need the transduction serum to be divided against himself; he still had many guilts to accept, and not much left of a lifetime to do it in.
    While he was waiting, perhaps he could learn to play the sareh.
     

 
    The poem which served as a springboard for this story is cited in the text, but someone with a taste for cryptanalysis might like to puzzle out the "synthetic language" used by Hrestce (whose name is a part of the code). Clue: It came 100 percent off a theater marquee in Brooklyn, and it is not a foreign language—just English with some letters missing.
    WRITING OF THE RAT
    They had strapped the Enemy to a chair, which in John Jahnke's opinion was neither necessary nor smart, but Jahnke was only a captain (Field rank). Ugly the squat, grey-furred, sharp-toothed creatures were, certainly; and their thick bodies, well over six feet tall, were frighteningly strong. But they were also proud and intelligent. They never ran amok in a hopeless situation; that would be beneath their dignity.
    The irons were going to make questioning the creature a good deal more difficult than it would have been other-wise—and that would have been difficult enough. But Jahnke was only a Field officer, and, what was worse, invalided home. Here it could hardly matter that he knew the Enemy better than any other human being alive. His opinions would be weighed against the fact that he had been invalided home from a Field where there were no battles. And the two years of captivity? A rest cure, the Home officers called them.
    "Where did you take him?" he asked Major Matthews. "Off a planet of 31 Cygni," Matthews growled, loosening his tie. "Whopping sun, a hundred fifty times as big as Sol, six