Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [96]
“I agree. Neither the government nor the military can directly confront the Pitar. But someone else can.”
“Someone else?” Rothenburg’s uncertainty showed in his expression. “Who else could possibly…?” He halted in mid-query. “You can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
Nadurovina did not smile. Her posture was as regimented as her thinking. “Tell me true, Erhard: Haven’t you ever, watching such happenings on the tridee, had the desire one time in your life to gamble a million credits or so on a single throw of the dice, or spin of the futures’ globe?”
They stepped out of the lift and into a main hallway, busy with nurses and medtechs, doctors and support personnel. The two by now familiar uniformed officers hardly rated a glance.
“We could lose him,” Rothenburg warned her. “The shock might be too much, even if the Pitar are involved only in his imagination. Fantasy can kill as readily as reality.”
“I’ll speak to Chimbu about it. Medication and specialists will be standing by at all times in the next room, ready to intervene.”
“What about the Pitar? What makes you think one of them will agree to see him?”
The colonel’s mouth twitched. “How could they refuse? Compassionate and neighborly as they are, it would look funny if they declined to offer their deepest sympathies to the sole survivor of the Treetrunk holocaust. Anyone who agrees to pay their respects will be intimately screened for the carrying of anything even potentially inimical, of course, before being allowed to come within a hundred kilometers of this island, much less this hospital. Much less Mr. Alwyn Mallory’s presence.”
“Even so,” Rothenburg felt compelled to point out as they turned a corner, “determined assassins invariably find a way.”
Nadurovina nodded thoughtfully. “In that event we would have something of an answer by roundabout means, wouldn’t we?” Rothenburg did not know what to say in response to this cool, detached calculation. “But I do not think that will be a problem. The Pitar may very well believe that we are testing them with words. If they are the responsible party, as Mallory continues to insist, then they will gladly go along with any test they believe will help to remove them from the list of suspected peoples. If they are not responsible and their participation in the atrocity is nothing more than a figment of Mr. Mallory’s addled imagination, no harm will have been done.”
“Not to human-Pitar relations, maybe,” Rothenburg objected, “but what about to the patient?”
“Time to roll the dice, Erhard.”
He smiled thinly at his colleague. “Easy to say when it’s not your sanity that’s at stake.”
His retort clearly troubled her. “In spite of what you may think, I don’t recommend this course of action easily or without qualms, Major. However inchoate, I am quite aware that Mr. Mallory is our only connection with whatever happened on Treetrunk. I have no more desire to see him lose his strengthening grasp on reality than you or anyone else. But I am the senior officer here, and I am the one being pressured for answers. Not informed speculation, not reasoned hypotheses, but answers. Whatever happens if we confront Mr. Mallory with his terrors, whatever the consequences, I am the one who will have to answer for them. I am prepared to take that risk.”
“Again, with somebody else’s dice.” Rothenburg refused to let his colleague and superior off the hook. “In spite of initial impressions I find myself liking this Mallory.”
“It is not his likability that is at stake here. For what it is worth, I like him, too. But in the resolution of this frightful mystery, neither his life, nor mine, nor yours, means anything.”
“All right. I’ll cosign on the requisite directives so long as you accept ultimate responsibility.”
She found herself walking toward the exit. Outside were languid breezes and the scent of orchids, the warm, moist aroma of mother Earth. Upstairs lay a lonely, frightened man who might hold the key to cataclysm, if only they could drag the proof or denial of it out of him.
“As senior officer on site, I