Time Traders II: The Defiant Agents Key Out of Time Read Free

You see Hough and talk to him personally—put it to him straight. He'll have to have all the facts if he's going to counter any move from Stanton before the council. You know every argument we can use and all the proof on our side, and you're authority enough to make it count."
    "If I can do all that, I will." Ashe was alert and eager. The colonel, seeing his change of expression, felt easier.
    But Kelgarries stood a moment watching Ashe as he hurried down a side corridor, before he moved on slowly to his own box of an office. Once inside he sat for a long time staring at the wall and seeing nothing but the pictures produced by his thoughts. Then he pressed a button and read off the symbols which flashed on a small viewscreen set in his desk. Punching a code, he relayed an order which might postpone trouble for a while. Ashe was far too valuable a man to lose, and his emotions could boil him straight into disaster over this.
    "Bidwell—reschedule Team A. They are to go to the Hypno-Lab instead of the reserve in ten minutes."
    Releasing the mike, he again stared at the wall. No one dared interrupt a hypno-training period, and this one would last three hours. Ashe could not possibly see the trainees before he left for New York. And that would remove one temptation from his path—he would not talk at the wrong time.
    Kelgarries' mouth twisted sourly. He took no pride in what he was doing. And he was perfectly certain that Ruthven would win and that Ashe's fears of Redax were well founded. It all came back to the old basic tenet of the service: the end justified the means. They must use every method and man under their control to make sure that Topaz would remain a Western possession, even though that strange planet now swung far beyond the sky which covered both Western Alliance and Greater Russia. Time had run out too fast; they were being forced to play what cards they held, even though those might be low ones. Ashe would be back, but not, Kelgarries hoped, until this had been decided one way or another. Not until this was finished.
    Finished! Kelgarries blinked at the wall. Perhaps they were finished, too. No one would know until the transport ship landed on that other world, that jewellike disk of gold-brown they had named Topaz.
     

2
    There were an even dozen of the air-borne guardians. Each swung in its own orbit just beyond the atmosphere of a bronze-gold planet in the four-world system of a yellow star. The globes had been launched to form a protective web around Topaz six months earlier. Just as contact mines sown in a harbor could close that landfall to ships not knowing the secret channel, so was this world supposedly closed to any spaceship lacking the signal to ward off the missiles the spheres could summon. This system for protecting the new human settlers had been tested as well as possible, but not as yet put to the ultimate proof. Still, the small bright globes spun undisturbed across a two-mooned sky at night and made reassuring blips on an installation screen by day.
    Then a thirteenth object winked into being and began the encircling, closing spiral of descent. A sphere resembling the warden-globes, it was a hundred times their size, and its orbit was controlled by instruments under the eye and hand of a human pilot.
    Four men were strapped down on cushioned sling-seats in the control cabin of the Western Alliance ship, two hanging where their fingers might reach buttons and levers. The two others were merely passengers, their own labor waiting for the time when they would set down on the alien soil of Topaz. The planet hung there in their viewscreen, richly beautiful in its amber gold, growing larger, nearer, so that they could pick out features of seas, continents, mountain ranges, which had been studied on tape until they were familiar—or as familiar as a world not Earth could be.
    One of the warden-globes came alert and oscillated in its set path. It whirled faster as its delicate interior