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* Title : #008 : SUMMIT CHASE *
* Series : The Destroyer *
* Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *
* Location : Gillian Archives *
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CHAPTER ONE
It is written in the ancient books that when visiting a man who is soon to die, one must carry the knotted rope of elephant tail.
So when the uniformed guard told him that the President would see him now, Vice President Asiphar waited until the guard had left, and then secreted the bulky knot in the right back pocket of his uniform trousers. Only then did he walk from his own office and follow the guard down the hall, the sounds of their heels clicking on the marble floor, the only rupture in the monumental stillness of the ornate palace.
Asiphar paused outside the carved, double-oak doors, took a deep breath and then pulled open the heavy door. He stepped inside, allowed the door to shut behind him, and looked up.
The President of Scambia was standing at the window, looking out over the grounds that surrounded the palace. The palace itself had been built of blue slate-like stones that were mined in the small and still new country; the grounds reflected the President's preoccupation with blue.
They were crisscrossed in mazes of pools and gardens and hedges. The water in the pools was blue, so were the flowers-even the precisely cut hedges were of so deep a green as to appear blue.
The uniforms of the palace guards were blue, too, and the President noted that fact with satisfaction. It would be the nation's tradition. When a nation is nothing-has nothing-tradition is not a bad place to begin building.
The only mar to the colour scheme of the palace was the yellow of the uniforms of the work crew laying a sewer under the roadway, at the corner of the east wing of the palace building. It annoyed the President to see it, as it had annoyed him every day for the four weeks the crew had been working. But he would say nothing. A nation must have sewers as well as tradition.