The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [102]
I hoped that I might be beginning to see the light, but I knew that I was overreaching from a position of almost total ignorance. Gray was in a far better position than I was to guess who was doing what to whom and why.
I was saved from further self-torture by yet another knock on the door. Adam Zimmerman came in, without waiting for an invitation. “Mr. Lowenthal wants to call a conference,” he said, mildly. “He thinks we should discuss our situation, and make what plans we can.” Lowenthal had obviously got tired of waiting for Gray to come up with the goods.
I handed my bowl and the empty water bottle back to Mortimer Gray. Reflexively, he took them. “Thanks,” I said.
Gray wasn’t about to be dismissed like that; he hung around to watch the first authentic contact between the man who had once stolen the world and the mysterious monster whose crimes had been erased from the record.
“Are you all right now?” Adam Zimmerman asked me, solicitously.
“Pretty much,” I said. “I’ve been hurt before. How about you? This isn’t the kind of welcome you expected when you took your great leap into the unknown.”
“No,” he admitted, “it certainly isn’t. But it was always a gamble — and if I hadn’t taken it, I’d be dead. I might still get what I wanted — unless you know different.” His face was old and his eyes seemed weak, but that was all deceptive appearance. His mind was as determined as it ever was. He hadn’t been interested in me before but he was interested in me now, because I was the one who had talked to Alice.
“So far as I can tell,” I assured him, “our captors wish us well. We just got caught up in somebody else’s troubles. With luck, we’ll come through this. Even I might still get what I want, if I can figure out what it is.”
The look he gave me then was slightly pitying. He was a man who had known exactly what he wanted throughout his adult life. For him, the goal had always been crystal clear, and perfectly simple. That might make him an innocent, by my standards, or even a fool — but it was an enviable state of mind.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go confer, and make what plans we can.”
Twenty-Six
Common Cause
The pain in my face hadn’t gone away, but it had become duller. Moving around no longer increased its effect. At least I’d contrived to miss out on my fair share of the work that had had to be done. By the time I emerged from my cell the common space had been reorganized and tidied. The table had been assembled and set up, and eight chairs had been neatly distributed around it, one at each end and three along each side.
As soon as I saw the array I knew that the chairs at the ends might as well have had Michael Lowenthal’s and Niamh Horne’s names on them. The moment they had decided to call a conference they had set about modeling the situation as they saw it — or as they wanted others to see it. I paused to wonder whether our mysterious captors had done the same thing when they placed us in cells two by two, or whether they had simply sorted us out according to our existing associations.
The other seats about the conference table were distributed according to fairly obvious protocols. Adam Zimmerman had to have one of the middle seats, so that he would be equidistant from Lowenthal and Horne, and Davida had to have the other. Solantha Handsel had to be at Lowenthal’s right hand, and Mortimer Gray filled in the remaining gap on that side of the table. That left Christine and me — and I wasn’t unduly surprised when Lowenthal laid claim to me, seating me between him and Zimmerman. The power to determine the seating suggested that he had the upper hand at this stage, perhaps for no better reason than the fact that he