He waited to make sure Shekt was not returning on the instant, and then slowly put his hand over the little gleaming light as he had seen them often do. Smoothly and silently the door slid open...The corridor was empty.
And so Schwartz "escaped."
How was he to know that for the six days of his residence there the Society of Ancients had its agents watching the hospital, his room, himself?
6. Apprehension In The Night
The Procurator's palace was scarcely less a fairyland at night. The evening flowers (none native to Earth) opened their fat white blossoms in festoons that extended their delicate fragrance to the very walls of the palace. Under the polarized light of the moon, the artificial silicate strands woven cleverly into the stainless aluminum alloy of the palace structure sparked a faint violet against the metallic sheen of their surroundings.
Ennius looked at the stars. They were the real beauty to him, since they were the Empire.
Earth's sky was of an intermediate type. It had not the unbearable glory of the skies of the Central Worlds, where star elbowed star in such blinding competition that the black of night was nearly lost in a coruscant explosion of light. Nor did it possess the lonely grandeur of the skies of the Periphery, where the unrelieved blackness was broken at great intervals by the dimness of an orphaned star-with the milky lens shape of the Galaxy spreading across the sky, the individual stars thereof lost in diamond dust.
On Earth two thousand stars were visible at one time. Ennius could see Sirius, round which circled one of the ten most populous planets of the Empire. There was Arcturus, capital of the sector of his birth. The sun of Trantor, the Empire's capital world, was lost somewhere in the Milky Way. Even under a telescope it was just part of a general blaze.
He felt a soft hand on his shoulder, and his own went up to meet it.
"Flora?" he whispered.
"It had better be," came his wife's half-amused voice. "Do you know that you haven't slept since you returned from Chica? Do you know further that it is almost dawn?... Shall I have breakfast sent out here?"
"Why not?" He smiled fondly up at her and felt in the darkness for the brown ringlet that hovered next her cheek. He tugged at it. "And must you wait up with me and shadow the most beautiful eyes in the Galaxy?"
She freed her hair and replied gently, "You are trying to shadow them yourself with your sugar syrup, but I've seen you this way before and am not in the tiniest hoodwinked. What worries you tonight, dear?"
"Why, that which always worries me. That I have buried you here uselessly, when there's not a viceregal society in the Galaxy you could not grace."
"Besides that! Come, Ennius, I will not be played with."
Ennius shook his head in the shadows and said, "I don't know. I think an accumulation of little puzzling things has finally sickened me. There's the matter of Shekt and his Synapsifier. And there's this archaeologist, Arvardan, and his theories. And other things, other things. Oh, what's the use, Flora-I'm doing no good here at all."
"Surely this time of the morning isn't quite the moment for putting your morale to the test."
But Ennius was speaking through clenched teeth. "These Earthmen! Why should so few be such a burden to the Empire? Do you remember, Flora, when I was first appointed to the Procuracy, the warnings I received from old Faroul, the last Procurator, as to the difficulties of the position?... He was right. If anything, he did not go far enough in his warnings. Yet I laughed at him at the time and privately thought him the victim of his own senile incapacity. I was young, active, daring. I would do better..." He paused, lost in himself, then continued, apparently at a disconnected point. "Yet so many independent pieces of evidence seem to show that these Earthmen are once again being misled into dreams of rebellion."
He looked up at his wife. "Do you know that it is the doctrine of the Society of Ancients that Earth was at one time the sole home of Humanity, that it is the appointed center of the race, the true representation of Man?"
"Why, so Arvardan told us two evenings ago, didn't he?" It was always best at these times to let him talk himself out.
"Yes, so he did," said Ennius gloomily, "but even so, he spoke only of the past. The Society of Ancients speaks of the future as well. Earth, once more, they say, will be the center of the race. They even claim that this mythical Second Kingdom of Earth is at hand; they warn that the Empire will be destroyed in a general catastrophe which will leave Earth triumphant in all its pristine glory"-and his voice shook-"as a backward, barbarous, soil-sick world. Three times before this same nonsense has raised rebellion, and the destruction brought down upon Earth has never served in the least to shake their stupid faith."
"They are but poor creatures," said Flora, "these men of Earth. What should they have, if not their Faith? They are certainly robbed of everything else-of a decent world, of a decent life. They are even robbed of the dignity of acceptance on a basis of equality by the rest of the Galaxy. So they retire to their dreams. Can you blame them?"
"Yes, I can blame them," cried Ennius with energy. "Let them turn from their dreams and fight for assimilation. They don't deny they are different. They simply wish to replace 'worse' by 'better,' and you can't expect the rest of the Galaxy to let them do that. Let them abandon their cliquishness, their outdated and offensive 'Customs.' Let them be men, and they will be considered men. Let them be Earthmen and they will be considered only as such.
"But never mind that. For instance, what's going on with the Synapsifier? Now there's a little thing that is keeping me from sleep." Ennius frowned thoughtfully at the dullness which was overcoming the polished darkness of the eastern sky.