The Mercenaries | Page 3

Judas," MacLeod said. "I suppose
there's always a place for Judas, at any table."
* * * * *
The MacLeod Team dined together, apart from their assistants and technicians and
students. This was no snobbish attempt at class-distinction: matters of Team policy were

often discussed at the big round table, and the more confidential details of their work.
People who have only their knowledge and their ideas to sell are wary about bandying
either loosely, and the six men and three women who faced each other across the
twelve-foot diameter of the teakwood table had no other stock-in-trade.
They were nine people of nine different nationalities, or they were nine people of the
common extra-nationality of science. That Duncan MacLeod, their leader, had grown up
in the Transvaal and his wife had been born in the Swedish university town of Upsala
was typical not only of their own group but of the hundreds of independent
research-teams that had sprung up after the Second World War. The scientist-adventurer
may have been born of the relentless struggle for scientific armament supremacy among
nations and the competition for improved techniques among industrial corporations
during the late 1950s and early '60s, but he had been begotten when two masses of
uranium came together at the top of a steel tower in New Mexico in 1945. And, because
scientific research is pre-eminently a matter of pooling brains and efforts, the
independent scientists had banded together into teams whose leaders acquired power
greater than that of any condottiere captain of Renaissance Italy.
Duncan MacLeod, sitting outwardly relaxed and merry and secretly watchful and bitterly
sad, was such a free-captain of science. One by one, the others had rallied around him,
not because he was a greater physicist than they, but because he was a bolder, more
clever, less scrupulous adventurer, better able to guide them through the maze of
international power-politics and the no less ruthless if less nakedly violent world of Big
Industry.
There was his wife, Karen Hilquist, the young metallurgist who, before she was
twenty-five, had perfected a new hardening process for SKF and an incredibly tough
gun-steel for the Bofors works. In the few minutes since they had returned to Team
Center, she had managed to change her coveralls for a skirt and blouse, and do something
intriguing with her hair.
And there was Kato Sugihara, looking younger than his twenty-eight years, who had
begun to demonstrate the existence of whole orders of structure below the level of
nuclear particles.
There was Suzanne Maillard, her gray hair upswept from a face that had never been
beautiful but which was alive with something rarer than mere beauty: she possessed, at
the brink of fifty, a charm and smartness that many women half her age might have
envied, and she knew more about cosmic rays than any other person living.
And Adam Lowiewski, his black mustache contrasting so oddly with his silver hair,
frantically scribbling equations on his doodling-pad, as though his racing fingers could
never keep pace with his brain, and explaining them, with obvious condescension, to the
boyish-looking Japanese beside him. He was one of the greatest of living mathematicians
by anybody's reckoning--the greatest, by his own.
And Sir Neville Lawton, the electronics expert, with thinning red-gray hair and

meticulously-clipped mustache, who always gave the impression of being in evening
clothes, even when, as now, he was dressed in faded khaki.
And Heym ben-Hillel, the Israeli quantum and wave-mechanics man, his heaping dinner
plate an affront to the Laws of Moses, his white hair a fluffy, tangled chaos, laughing at
an impassively-delivered joke the English knight had made.
And Rudolf von Heldenfeld, with a thin-lipped killer's mouth and a frozen face that never
betrayed its owner's thoughts--he was the specialist in magnetic currents and
electromagnetic fields.
And Farida Khouroglu, the Turkish girl whom MacLeod and Karen had found begging in
the streets of Istanbul, ten years ago, and who had grown up following the fortunes of the
MacLeod Team on every continent and in a score of nations. It was doubtful if she had
ever had a day's formal schooling in her life, but now she was secretary of the Team, with
a grasp of physics that would have shamed many a professor. She had grown up a beauty,
too, with the large dark eyes and jet-black hair and paper-white skin of her race. She and
Kato Sugihara were very much in love.
A good team; the best physics-research team in a power-mad, knowledge-hungry world.
MacLeod thought, toying with the stem of his wineglass, of some of their triumphs: The
West Australia Atomic Power Plant. The Segovia Plutonium Works, which had got them
all titled as Grandees of the restored Spanish Monarchy. The sea-water chemical
extraction plant in Puerto Rico, where they had