"Easiest thing in the world, Mr. Courtenay," he promised. "I'll get the enabling bill put through committee this afternoon, and with any luck at all it'll clear both houses tonight."
I said expansively, "Fine. Need any backing?"
"Oh, I don't think so, Mr. Courtenay. Might be nice for you to address the House in the morning, if you can find the time. They'd love to hear from you, and it would smooth things over a little for a quick passage."
"Glad to," I said, reaching down for my bag. The man in the bowler hat beat me to it and handed it to me with a little bow. "Just set your time, Abels," I told the legate. "I'll be there."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Courtenay!" He opened the door for me. The little man said tentatively:
"Mr. Abels?"
The legate shook his head. "You can see how busy I am," he said, not unkindly. "Come back tomorrow."
The little man smiled gratefully and followed me out the door. We both hailed a cab and he opened the door for me. You know what cabs are like in Washington. "Can I drop you anywhere?" I asked.
"It's very good of you," he said, and followed me in. The driver leaned back on his pedals and looked in at us.
I told him: "The Park Starr for me. But drop the other gentleman off first."
"Sure." The driver nodded. "White House, Mr. President?"
"Yes, please," said the little man. "I can't tell you how pleased I am to meet you, Mr. Courtenay," he went on. "I overheard your conversation with Mr. Abels, you know. It was very interesting to hear that the Venus rocket is so near completion. Congress has pretty well got out of the habit of keeping me posted on what's going on. Of course, I know they're busy with their investigations and all. But—" He smiled. Mischievously, he said: "I entered your contest, Mr. Courtenay. My slogan was, 'I'm starry-eyed over Stairs, verily I am.' I don't suppose I could have gone along though, even if I'd won."
I said very sincerely: "I can't see how it would have been possible." And, a little less sincerely, "Besides, they must keep you pretty busy right here."
"Oh, not particularly. January's heavy; I convene Congress, you see, and they read me the State of the Union message. But the rest of the year passes slowly. Will you really address Congress tomorrow, Mr. Courtenay? It would mean a joint session, and they usually let me come for that."
"Be delighted to have you," I said cordially.
The little man had a warm smile, glinting through his glasses. The cab stopped and the President shook my hand warmly and got out. He poked his head in the door. "Uh," he said, looking apprehensively at the driver, "you've been swell. I may be stepping out of line in saying this, but if I might make a suggestion—I understand something about astronomy, it's a kind of hobby, and I hope you won't delay the ship's take-off past the present conjunction."
I stared. Venus was within ten degrees of opposition and was getting farther away—not that it mattered, since most of the trip would be coasting anyhow.
He held a finger to his lips. "Good-bye, sir," he said. I spent the rest of the trip staring at the backs of the driver's hairy ears, and wondering what the little man had been driving at.
We took the evening off, Kathy and I, to see the sights. I wasn't too much impressed. The famous cherry blossoms were beautiful, all right, but, with my new-found Conservationist sentiments, I found them objectionably ostentatious. "A dozen would have been plenty," I objected. "Scattering them around in vase after vase this way is a plain waste of the taxpayer's money. You know what they'd cost in Tiffany's?"
Kathy giggled. "Mitch, Mitch," she said. "Wait till we take over Venus. Did you ever think of what it's going to be like to have a whole planet to grow things in? Acres and acres of flowers—trees— everything?"
A plump schoolteacher-type leaning on the railing beside us straightened up, glared, sniffed, and walked away. "You're giving us a bad name," I told Kathy. "Before you get us in trouble, let's go to —let's go back to the hotel."
I woke up to an excited squeal from Kathy. "Mitch," she was saying from the bathroom, two round eyes peering wonderingly over the towel that was draped around her, "they've got a tub here! I opened the door to the shower stall, and it wasn't a stall at all! Can I, Mitch? Please?"
There are times when even an honest conservationist finds pleasure in being the acting head of Fowler Schocken Associates. I yawned and blew her a kiss and said, "Sure. And—make it all fresh water, hear?"
Kathy pretended to faint, but I noticed that she wasted no time calling room service. While the tub was filling I dressed. We breakfasted comfortably and strolled to the Capitol hand in hand.
I found Kathy a seat in the pressbox and headed for the floor of the House. Our Washington lobby chief pushed through the crowd to me. He handed me a strip of facsimile paper. "It's all here, Mr. Courtenay," he said. "Uh—is everything all right?"
"Everything's just fine," I told him. I waved him off and looked at the facsimile. It was from Dicken, on the scene at the rocket:
Passengers and crew alerted and on standby. First movement into ships begins at 1145 EST, loading completed by 1645 EST. Ship fully fueled, supplied, and provisioned since 0915. Security invoked but MIA, GIG, and Time-Life known to have filed coded dispatches through dummies. Chartroom asks please remind you: Take-off possible only in A.M. hours.
I rubbed the tape between my palms; it disintegrated into ash. As I climbed to the podium, someone tugged at my elbow. It was the President, leaning out of his ceremonial box. "Mr. Courtenay," he whispered, his smile masklike on his face, "I guess you understood what I was trying to tell you yesterday in the cab. I'm glad the rocket's ready. And—" he widened his grin and bobbed his head in the precise manner of a statesman exchanging inconsequentialities with a distinguished visitor, "you probably know this, but—he's here."
I had no chance to find out who "he" was. As the Speaker of the House came toward me hand outstretched and the applause started from the floor, I forced a smile to my face. But it was a trick of the rictus muscles entirely. I had little to smile about, if the news about the Venus rocket had trickled down to the President.
Fowler Schocken was a pious old hypocrite and Fowler Schocken was a grinning fraud, but if it hadn't been for Fowler Schocken Icould never have got through that speech. I could hear his voice in my ears: "Sell 'em, Mitch; you can sell them if you'll keep in mind that they want to buy." And I sold the assembled legislators precisely what they wanted to own. I touched briefly on American enterprise and the home; I offered them a world to loot and a whole plunderable universe beyond it, once Fowler Schocken's brave pioneers had opened the way for it; I gave them a picture of assembly-line planets owned and operated by our very selves, the enterprising American businessmen who had made civilization great. They loved it. The applause was fantastic.
As the first waves died down, there were a dozen standing figures in the hall, clapping their hands and begging the chair for recognition. I hardly noticed; astonishingly, Kathy was gone from the press-box. The Speaker selected white-haired old Colbee, lean and dignified with his four decades of service.
"The chair recognizes the gentleman from Yummy-Cola."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Speakuh." Colbee's face wore a courtly smile; but his eyes seemed to me the eyes of a snake. Yummy-Cola was nominally one of the few big independents; but I remembered that Fowler had commented once on their captive agency's surprising closeness to Taunton. "If I may ventuah to speak for the Upper Chamber, I should like to thank ouah distinguished guest for his very well-chosen remarks heah. I am certain that we all have enjoyed listening to a man of his calibeh and standing." Go back to the Berlitz school, you Westchester phony, I thought bitterly. I could feel the wienie coming as Colbee rumbled on. "With the permission of the chair, I should like to ask ouah guest a number of questions involving the legislation we have been asked to consider heah today." Consider indeed, you bastard, I thought. By now even the galleries had caught on to what was happening. I hardly needed to hear the rest:
"I
t may have escaped youah attention, but we are fortunate in having with us another guest. I refer of course to Mr. Taunton." He waved gracefully to the visitor's gallery, where B. J.'s red face appeared between two solid figures that I should have recognized at the first moment as his bodyguards. "In a brief discussion before ouah meeting heah, Mr. Taunton was good enough to give me some information which I would like Mr. Co'tenay to comment upon. First—" the snake eyes were steel now, "I would ask Mr. Co'tenay if the name of George Groby, wanted for Contract Breach and Femicide, is familiar to him. Second, I would like to ask if Mr. Co'tenay is Mr. Groby. Third, I would like to ask Mr. Co'tenay if there is any truth to the repo't, given me in confidence by someone in whom Mr. Taunton assures me I can repose absolute trust, that Mr. Co'tenay is a membeh in good standing of the World Conservation Association, known to most of us who are loyal Amurricans as—"
Even Colbee himself could not have heard the last words of his sentence. The uproar was like a physical blast.
nineteen
Seen in retrospect, everything that happened in the next wild quarter of an hour blurs and disappears like the shapes in a spinning kaleidoscope. But I remember tableaux, frozen moments of time that seem almost to have no relation to each other:
The waves of contempt and hatred that flowed around me, the contorted face of the President below me, screaming something unheard to the sound engineer in his cubicle, the wrathful eyes of the Speaker as he reached out for me.
Then the wild motion halted as the President's voice roared through the chamber at maximum amplification: "I declare this meeting adjourned!"—and the stunned expressions of the legislators at his unbelievable temerity. There was greatness in that little man. Before anyone could move or think he clapped his hands—the magnified report was like atomic fission—and a smartly uniformed squad moved in on us. "Take him away," the President declaimed, with a magnificent gesture, and at double-time the squad surrounded me and hustled me off the podium. The President convoyed us as far as the door while the assembly gathered its wits. His face was white with fear, but he whispered: "I can't make it stick, but it'll take them all afternoon to get a ruling from the C of C. God bless you, Mr. Courtenay."
And he turned back to face them. I do not think Caligula's Christians walked more courageously into the arena.
The guards were the President's own, honor men from Brink's leadership academy. The lieutenant said never a word to me, but I could read the controlled disgust on his face as he read the slip of paper the President had handed him. I knew he didn't like what he was ordered to do, and I knew he would do it.
They got me to Anacostia and put me on the President's own transport; they stayed with me and fed me, and one of them played cards with me, as the jets flared outside the ports and we covered territory. All they would not do was talk to me.
It was a long flight in that clumsy old luxury liner that "tradition" gave the President. Time had been wasted at the airport, and below us I could see the fuzzy band of the terminator creeping past. As we came down for a landing, it was full dark. And the waiting was not yet over, nor the wondering if Kathy had got out all right too and when I would see her again. The lieutenant left the ship alone; he was gone for a long, long time.
I spent the time kicking questions around in my mind—questions that had occurred to me before, but which I had dismissed. Now, with all the time in the world, and a future full of ifs, I took them out and looked them over.
For instance:
Kathy and Matt Runstead and Jack O'Shea had plotted together to put me on ice literally. All right, that accounted for most of the things that puzzled me. But it didn't account for Hester. And, when you stopped to think of it, it didn't account for all of Runstead's work, either.
The Consies were in favor of space travel. But Runstead had sabotaged the Venus test in Cal-Mex. There was no doubt of that; I had as good as a confession from his fall-guy. Could it have been a double cross? Runstead posing as a Consie who was posing as a copysmith, and in reality what?
I began wishing for Kathy for a completely new reason.
When the lieutenant came back it was midnight. "All right," he said to me. "A cab's waiting for you outside. The runner knows where to go."
I climbed out and stretched. "Thanks," I said awkwardly.
The lieutenant spat neatly on the ground between my feet. The door slammed, and I scrambled out of the way of the take-off.
The cab-runner was Mexican. I tried him on a question; no English. I tried again in my Chlorella U. Spanish; he gaped at me. There were fifty good reasons why I didn't want to go along with him without a much better idea of what was up. But when I stopped to think of it, I had damnall choice. The lieutenant had followed his orders. Now the orders were complied with, and I could see his active little military mind framing the report that would tip someone off to where they could find the notorious Consie, Mitchell Courtenay.
I would be a sitting duck; it would depend on whether Taunton or the police got to me first. It was not a choice worth spending much time over.
I got in the cab.
You'd think the fact that the runner was a Mexican would have tipped me off. It didn't, though. It was not until I saw the glimmer of starlight on the massive projectile before me that I knew I was in Arizona, and knew what the President had done for me.
A mixed squad of Pinkertons and our own plant protection men closed in on me and hustled me past the sentry-boxes, across the cleared land, up to the rocket itself. The OIC showed me the crescent he could make with thumb and forefinger and said: "You're safe now, Mr. Courtenay."
"But I don't want to go to Venus!" I said.
He laughed out loud.
Hurry up and wait; hurry up and wait. The long, dreary flight had been a stasis; everything at both ends of it had been too frantic with motion over which I had no control to permit thought. They gave me no chance to think here, either; I felt someone grabbing the seat of my pants, and I was hoisted inside. There I was dragged more than led to an acceleration hammock, strapped in and left.
The hammock swung and jolted, and twelve titans brooded on my chest. Good-by, Kathy; good-by, Schocken Tower. Like it or not, I was on my way to Venus.
But it wasn't good-by to Kathy.
It was she herself who came to unstrap me when the first blast was over.
I got out of the hammock and tottered weightlessly, rubbing my back. I opened my mouth to make a casual greeting. What came out was a squeaky, "Kathy!"
It wasn't a brilliant speech, but I didn't have time for a brilliant speech. Kathy's lips and my lips were occupied.
When we stopped for breath I said, "What alkaloids do you put into the product?" but it was wasted. She wanted to be kissed again. I kissed her.
It was hard work, standing up. Every time she moved we lurched against the rail or drifted off the floor entirely; only a standby jet was operating and we were otherwise beyond any consideration.
We sat down.
After a while, we talked.
I stretched and looked around me. "Lovely place you have here," I said. "Now that that's taken care of, I have something else on my mind. Questions: two of them." I told her what the questions were.
I explained about Runstead's lousing up San Diego and Venus Project. And about Hester's murder.
"Oh, Mitch," she said. "Where do I begin? How'd you ever get to be star class?"
"Went to night school," I said. "I'm still listening."
"Well, you should be able to figure it out. Sure, we Consies wanted space travel. The human race needs Venus. It needs an unspoiled, unwrecked, unexploited, unlooted, un—"
"Oh," I said.
"—unpirated, undevastated—well, you see. Sure we wanted a ship to go to Venus. But we didn't want Fowler Schocken on Venus. Or Mitchell Courtenay, either. Not as long as Mitchell Courtenay was the kind of guy who would gut Venus for an extra megabuck's billing. There aren't too many planets around that the race can expand into, Mitch. We couldn't
have Fowler Schocken's Venus Project succeed."
"Um," I said, digesting. "And Hester?"
Kathy shook her head. "You figure that one out," she said.
"You don't know the answer?"
"I do know the answer. It isn't hard."
I coaxed, but she wouldn't play. So I kissed her for a while again, until some interfering character with a ship's-officer rosette on his shoulder came grinning in. "Care to look at the stars, folks?" he asked, in a tourist-guide way that I detested. It didn't pay to pull rank on him, of course; ships' officers always act a cut above their class, and it would have been ungraceful, at least, to brace him for it. Besides—
Besides.
The thought stopped me for a moment: I was used to being star class by now. It wasn't going to be fun, being one of the boys. I gave my Consie theory a quick mental runthrough. No, there was nothingin it that indicated I would have a show-dog's chance of being sirred and catered to any more.
Hello, Kathy. Good-by, Schocken Tower.
Anyway, we went up to the forward observation port. All the faces were strange to me.
There isn't a window to be found on the Moon ships; radar-eyed, GCA-tentacled, they sacrifice the esthetic but useless spectacle of the stars for the greater strength of steel. I had never seen the stars in space before.
Outside the port was white night. Brilliant stars shining against a background of star particles scattered over a dust of stars. There wasn't a breadth of space the size of my thumbnail where there was blackness; it was all light, all fiery pastels. A rim of fire around the side of the port showed the direction of the sun.
The Space Merchants Page 17
