[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]accept the position," he said flatly.
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Domler remarked, "Maybe we should drag you to a psych-releaser! This was your
proposal, yet when you are chosen by criteria you yourself specified "
"It's my age, damn it!" Morimet bawled in annoyance that for an instant broke
through his vengeance
pattern. "When I said maintain the war in our time, I meant more than the next
ten or fifteen years! We need a younger person for the Executive!"
Farsit nodded slowly. He glanced at his slip of paper again. "The numerical
scores of the rest of us are closely clustered, well below your own, Morimet.
I'm in second place, but by too slight a margin to mean much. If your age
rules you out, and I agree that it should, then our choice of a candidate is
not obvious to me."
"Well, I don't insist that the Executive be one of us," said Morimet. "I'm
willing to go along with whatever modifications of my proposal you consider
realistic." He hesitated, then added, "In fact, I know of a young man, a
recent infiltration casualty, who might make an excellent candidate, although
his motivation is rather shot at this moment."
"Who's that?"
"His name is Glan Combrit."
"Oh, yes," nodded Farsit, "Combrit. A brilliant record. He was one of your
junior execs when you were an active corporate raider, wasn't he?"
"He was more than that," said Morimet. "He wound up running the whole Exchange
end of my operation. Since then he's had a varied and highly successful
career, most recently as an industrial espionage agent on several Lontastan
planets. And it wasn't a slip on his part that has him out of action now. Even
after the Lontastans got wise to him, it's to his credit that he managed to
elude their goon squads and get home with a reasonably whole skin. He knows
the econo-war, and he's a gifted strategist who can play it by the book or
come up with creative solutions of his own. He's in recuperation on Earth
right now. I visited him there a couple of weeks ago."
"I protest this discussion, Chairman!" Grayme complained loudly. "It is
premature! Nothing has been decided!"
"Sustained," said Domler. "The discussion unjustifiably presumes a favorable
decision on Morimet's proposal."
Morimet rose from his chair, his vengeance pattern slam-slamming harder than
usual. "You have my proposal," he snorted, "and my arguments in its favor. I'm
going home, and let you haggle over it as long-windedly as you like. Maybe you
can do that better without my emo present to distract you!"
He whirled and stalked from the chamber. Once alone, he permitted himself a
small grin.
* * *
Outside the building, Morimet glanced up with an old man's caution for
obstacles in his path. The sky was blue and empty. He activated his transport
implants and soared upward, on semi-inert mode and propelled by repulsor
field.
His home, on the other side of the planet, could have been reached most
quickly by lifting totally out of the atmosphere, making three right-angle
minimal warps, and then descending. But he was in no hurry.
He had nothing to do at home but await word of the Board's decision, and he
suspected the decision was hours away.
Besides, he was skittish about warping in the vicinity of a planet. There was
too much gas, even ten
thousand miles above the atmosphere proper, for warping to be totally safe.
That was how he had got stuck in his vengeance fixation. Warp did not take a
man out of prime-field space, only out of matter-energy-time space. And every
particle of gas carried its share of prime-field and a man's mind was itself a
patterned, durable prime-field matrix. A man who warped through a too dense
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wisp of gas could have his mind knocked right out of his body . . . knocked
out at a velocity several times the speed of light.
The trauma of such an experience wasn't mild. The disassociation of mind and
body was not bad in itself; in fact, that was a rather useless trick most any
sane adult could do at will for amusement. And whether knocked out in warp or
wittingly sent wandering, the mind matrix snapped back into place, as if from
the end of a taut rubber band, as soon as it was permitted to do so.
The damaging factor about warp knock-out was the sheer speed with which it
happened, the sudden recognition by both mind and body of the presence of
relative motion of a magnitude both found innately
"abnormal". And worse, this superlight motion was separating them.
In more respects than one, the experience was more traumatic than death
itself. It was, in fact, one of the few types of trauma that a sane adult
could not break without the help of a psych-releaser.
Thus it had happened several years ago that Radge Morimet, indulging himself
in a moment of vengeful anger after a minor econo-war setback, had warped
toward his headquarters planet . . . and had cut it too close. He had come out
of warp in the stratosphere that is, his body had while his mind matrix had
been knocked away by the outermost fringes of the ionosphere. The ionosphere
was no mere wisp of gas; its prime-field was solid
. It had stopped his mind matrix cold.
Reassociation took place in far less than a second, but not before the mind
matrix was fixed by shock in the vengeance pattern it was holding at the
instant of knock-out.
But, as Morimet had quickly realized, a touch of unsanity had its usefulness,
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