THE MEETING BROKE UP, VERY NEARLY IN DISORDER. RAIGMORE let it break up. Curiously enough, more than half the members still seemed suspicious of Salter’s conclusion and Raigmore’s acceptance of it. They felt they were being pushed into something. They distrusted what they couldn’t understand.
But Raigmore knew the White Stars would be with him when the warning went forth. They would agree that Salter’s theory was the best one to work on. So would the council, eventually. They merely had to be left alone, given time to get used to the idea. Lower down in the scale of intelligence, people would believe, as they always had, what they were told.
Raigmore wanted time too. He didn’t want to do anything irrevocable, either way. So he didn’t point out yet, as he could have done, that to be sure that Martian attack would go the way they wanted it to go the invaders must have had at least a thousand saboteurs there. Nor that Earth, on the same basis, must have tens of thousands of them….
Left with Alison, Salter, Gloria, Margo and Morton, he was as noncommittal as he could possibly be with such a group. He was certain he was with them; but he was determined not to back one side completely before hearing the other’s case.
“We may have only a few hours’ grace,” he said, “and we’re faced with perhaps the greatest case of subtlety in history. We not only have to work out what to think, but what we’re probably meant to think. And point one is whether we’re supposed to have seen what you worked out, Fred, or not.”
“Look how nearly we didn’t,” objected Alison.
“On the other hand,” said Gloria, “if they made it clearer we might have refused to consider it.”
Morton cleared his throat and spoke. “I’m ready to take this theory about spies as a working hypothesis,” he said. “But I know why the others weren’t. The New London operator pointed out that the rate of deceleration of the ships indicated pretty clearly that the creatures inside couldn’t be human. Now we’re saying that some of them are among us and we’ve never known it.”
They went on talking round the point, Raigmore doing his best, reluctantly, to keep them at it. Morton wanted to expand the defense forces, the fleet, everything. Raigmore told him to do that only on the basis of keeping the whole force balanced.
“Don’t double it for a ten-per-cent increase in efficiency,” he said. “That’s all right when your force can acquire battle experience fairly easily and cheaply. I don’t think that’s going to be possible this time.”
“If the invaders appear over Washington in the next few minutes,” said Morton, harassed, “what are we going to do?”
“Nothing,” said Raigmore, “in the next five minutes. Earth’s defense, such as it is, is best left alone for the moment. We can multiply it in power, but we can’t alter it in kind. If the invaders attack at once, we have to let the present defense force do what they can.”
He managed more or less to maintain the status quo. Morton was left to expand all forces cautiously; Raigmore said that was all that could be done for the moment. It wasn’t, of course. He could have pointed out that if the saboteurs existed, and if they had insinuated themselves into Earth’s defenses, the thing to do was to change the defense personnel everywhere as far as possible — merely to change it, since any change must be for the better.
He wanted to work wholeheartedly for Earth. But he felt that in his ignorance he couldn’t — and that soon, very soon, he must have more information to work on. If he was there with a purpose, he calculated that it was just about time he was told what that purpose was. Already he had had chances which he hadn’t taken.
“Now I think we should break up and get some sleep,” he said. Waiting for the exact text of the Mars reports, getting the council together, holding the meeting and the discussion after it had somehow run away with the whole day. And though they didn’t feel that much had been done, they were tired.
“Sleep!” muttered Morton.
Raigmore surveyed him with a grim smile. “Do you think you’ll be better able to deal with an attack tomorrow or the next day if you don’t?”
Salter took Raigmore a little ahead of Alison and Margo as they made their way to their bedrooms.
“Shouldn’t you and Alison stay well apart for the time being, Raigmore?” he asked quietly, not at all like the lazy, cheerful Salter Raigmore knew. “If you stay together, a well-placed bomb or a couple of quick shots will mean we’re looking for another leader. Hadn’t you better send Margo and Alison somewhere else, to some other city — Millo, perhaps?”
Raigmore shook his head. “I see your point, Fred,” he admitted, “but I want Alison around. If something does happen soon, we want a compact little force, the five of us, to be ready to act together. Besides …”
He hesitated, working out how to say what he meant to say so that it would make sense to Salter. “There’s another thing, Fred,” he said at last. “We agreed that the whole Mars affair was principally a demonstration, didn’t we? That it was arranged so that we would think the invaders were invincible?”
“Well, that’s one possibility,” Salter said. “There are others.”
“Right. Suppose it was a demonstration. What’s the point of a demonstration like that?”
“Psychological. To show us there’s no use trying.”
“With what purpose?”
Salter stopped. “You’ve got something up your sleeve. Hadn’t we better get the girls in this?”
Raigmore took his arm and led him on. “I don’t want the girls in this if I can help it. What purpose would there be in showing us there’s no use trying?”
Salter was puzzled. “To make us surrender easily, I expect,” he said.
“Exactly. Then don’t you think that someone may possibly give us the chance?”
“Now, you mean? Before an attack on Earth?”
“Yes.”
Salter considered that. He nodded. “It won’t work, of course,” he said. “We obviously aren’t going to surrender. But the invaders, whoever they are, might try it.”
Raigmore didn’t know whether he was at last remembering things from before May 23, or just working them out for himself. But he was sure now that the invaders would try to make contact with him, their man, in a matter of hours. He wanted them to do it. He wanted it desperately.
And he had to make it possible for them to do it.
He didn’t know how the contact would be achieved. But certainly it would have to be done secretly, for if he was to remain useful to them, as Earth’s leader, there must be no suspicion that he was a spy. Someone had to get to him alone and unknown, and that might not be possible if Salter continued to guard him closely.
“I agree with what you said this far,” Raigmore went on. “Alison can sleep where we were last night, and I’ll go somewhere else in the building. But if anyone comes to see me, I want you to let him through.”
“Are you crazy?” Salter demanded. “That’s exactly how — ”
“That’s exactly how I think a surrender ultimatum would be delivered to us. We know the invaders have agents here, and they must know what’s going on. If they have anything to say, they’ll come to me.”
Raigmore had to argue for quite a while before Salter began to see that there might be something in what he said. And Alison, sensing that something was going on, joined them in the middle of the discussion, looking from one to the other.
“What’s the argument?” she asked.
Raigmore recognized at once that he wasn’t going to be able to arrange things quite as he wanted. Some women might be fobbed off with a casual lie, but not Alison. Reluctantly he told her what he had told Salter.
“I think you’re right,” said Alison briskly. “Now that that’s settled, let’s go to bed.”
Raigmore frowned. “You mean …”
“I mean, let’s make it possible for a spy to come and see us if he likes. Fred and Margo can stay out of the way.”
Fred protested, but Raigmore was prepared to accept the compromise. He had to be; there was no shifting Alison. He knew she would be safe whatever happened, because she represented part of his power.
Naturally Margo and particularly Fred remained a little puzzled by the situation. That couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t possible always to kill two birds with one stone, to find some course — like the dispatch of Mallin from Earth — which was satisfactory from all points of view. It was as a game of chess must look to chessmen endowed with intelligence but not full perception. They wouldn’t understand why a queen should be risked for no obvious, immediate gain. They wouldn’t see that the queen, as it happened, was safe, because things were arranged so that more would be lost in capturing her than could possibly be gained. Alison sensed something of that.
Perhaps it was because she did that she said later, when she and Raigmore were alone in their bedroom: “There’s more in this than you’re telling me, Eldin, isn’t there?”
She was looking at him steadily. Raigmore admitted it at once. “But there’s a good reason for not telling you, Alison,” he added.
“You mean I might not do the right thing if I knew?”
“Something like that. Will you trust me?”
She smiled faintly. “That’s a silly question. I may think you’re wrong, but there’s no question of not trusting you.”
Raigmore hoped that nothing would ever happen to change that.