Well: now it was being given back.
“You think I did?” Aaron Norin said. Every room in the ship echoed endlessly; he kept on hearing his voice. Even in the control-rooms, where you’d think men needed quiet . . . but of course he had to stay. No one was really trustworthy, not yet. “You think anybody wanted to kill the First Engineer?”
Gover looked uncomfortable. A lumpy small brute; a man. “Well,” he said. “It had to be done; we all know that. All the same . . .” He rubbed his hands along the tan sides of his uniform. “If we’d locked him up . . .”
“If we’d locked him up we’d be like every mutiny in the last fifty years,” Aaron said; you’d think any man, even a power assistant, would understand the simple things. “More than fifty years. We had to take the first step: we had to be serious.”
“We were—”
“We are now,” Aaron cut in, flattening doubt in determination. “If we’d locked the Chief up, he’d have talked half the crew round again in ten hours.”
Gover’s chin went as stubborn as he could make it. “Not—”
“Not you, of course,” Aaron said, looking at the lumpy man. “Not you. But others. You can see how that might be.”
There was a little silence. “I suppose I can,” Gover said.
Aaron let his expression soften. “Of course you can see how it might be.” You had to flatter the youngsters, the power assistants; there wasn’t any other way to get the job done. And of course when they did understand, they’d agree....
“All the same,” Gover said, “if we’d given him a chance—just a chance—”
“He’d have taken it right away from us,” Aaron snapped. “Now, how are they—” He caught himself. “What are they doing, out there?”
“They’re all right.” Gover shrugged, his eyes still uneasy. “We’ll all be okay, you know,” he said. “We’re in a holding orbit again. Spiraled in, and holding. We can stick for a day or better if we have to without course correction.”
Good news, if expected news. “You heard my—the broadcast,” Aaron said. Gover nodded. “All right, then. How did they take it?”
“You know that,” Gover said. “You heard them.”
“I mean afterward. When they were alone.”
“Oh, they were all right. They’ll stick.” Gover paused. “In a way,” he began slowly, “that’s what I came in about. To see you about, I mean.”
“What?” Gover seemed suddenly to grow a little more distinct, a little larger. There was nothing to worry about.
“They’re a little—not worried, you know,” Gover said. “Not worried. But they’re not sure—”
“We’ve got to do this,” Aaron said.
“I know. But they’re not—they’re not all—” Gover stopped for a long time. “It’s what I said. We should have given him a chance.”
Aaron shut his eyes. There had to be an answer—a better answer than the one he knew he was going to deliver. But there’s nothing to worry about. “We couldn’t do that. You understand.”
“Sure,” Gover said doubtfully. “But the others—” “They’ll stick?” Aaron said sharply.
Gover nodded. “They’ll stick.” In the same doubtful tone.
And the time was near, now, altogether too near. A day . . . but he had a good deal less than a day. Thoth was targeted, and there had been no reply from anywhere. Nothing to worry about; but surely there were going to be interceptors? The Government couldn’t get through, he’d arranged that. There was freedom ...
Thoth, that great city. Destroyed. A wonderful idea.
Where were the interceptors? That was the question. Gover had said something; Aaron looked at him and wrinkled his forehead: inquiry.
“Look,” the lumpy man said. “We don’t want to— I mean, if we don’t have to—there’s been enough. We’ve seen that, you know. The Chief—well, if we don’t have to—”
“You’re going to have to.” Flat and final; it was the only way. Power. When they understood, they’d accept.
But Gover was going on. “Wohner, now—he has relatives—”
“We all have relatives, somewhere. This is for everyone.”
“We’ll wait until we have to—”
“Of course we will,” Aaron said quickly. He let a few seconds of silence go by, while he heard his voice repeat along the walls. “But if we do have to—”
“They’ll stick,” Gover said at once, and, seeming uncertain, waited in his turn. “But—you have to understand how it is.”
Behind all the words, something had been growing in Aaron’s mind; he felt it come to term and saw, all at once, that he had his answer. “Three hours,” he said, and Gover said:
“Three—what?”
Aaron nearly smiled. Peace and tension existed at once within him. “In three hours we’ll be over Thoth,” he said. “Then”
Gover stared. “But nobody’s tried to stop—”
“They will,” Aaron said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“Look—”
Aaron looked at the lumpy man with the eyes of a savage. “Three hours,” he said, all cold, all decided, all complete. When they understand . . .
And saw beneath him that great city, shards and smoke.
Gover stared; but whatever he had meant to say was lost as the alarm gongs began. Both men tensed, ready to move for the controls or the door; the immense, world-filling gong continued for less than a second more, and stopped. In the silence echoes rang, dying; as the men relaxed, the terrible sound began again: alarm, alarm. Men had served for ten years without hearing that sound except in drill.
Eight seconds, perhaps less, until silence fell.
And after the silence that insane sound shook the room, shook the small ship, again; and then again.
Silence. Aaron said, “What in Hell is that?” in a voice so scratched he barely recognized it; before Gover could say a word the gong began again. Both men waited, then, for the following silence. There seemed no regularity to the spacing of chaos and silence, none at all.
Gover spoke into the sudden echoes when he could. “I—it’s an alarm. Shield alarm. System damage that—”
“No shield alarm ever made ought to—”
The ringing began again. Aaron shut his eyes against it, felt the floor shiver, and waited for silence.
“—ought to go on and off like that.”
“No.”
“Like—”
Again: unbearable, everlasting sound. It stopped; echoes trembled in the shocked air.
“Like a damned blinker system. For ears instead of eyes.”
And it was Gover, the power assistant, the man who had to be taught, Cover, who saw. “That’s right.”
“What’s—”
An interruption.
“—right?” Aaron asked.
“A blinker,” Gover said. “It must be—interference. They’re—”
The gong cut thought and speech to pieces.
“They’re trying to get a message through to us.”
Aaron tried to consider that. Gover was right; a major station might be able to interfere with the shield system itself, and use intermittent gongs as a code signal ... it was possible. More than possible. It was—
An interruption.
—just what they’d do. Get a message through. And the answer came to him from that growing structure in his mind. On which he had begun to depend, without learning to do so; on which he, himself, Aaron, seemed to be supported. “Ignore it,” he said flatly.
“But we can’t—”
An interruption.
Aaron ignored the echoes, the ache in his head, the shiver of the ship. “All right,” he said. He had to satisfy Gover, satisfy all of them; his own plans, or the plans that had in peace and strain become his own, would be private. For a time. “Detail somebody. It should be the usual code system. Find out what it—”
An interruption.
“—says. Get it to me at once. And meanwhile ..
“Three hours,” Aaron said, as the gong began again and everything else was totally erased.
In the private audience chamber where he had seen Norin and Leverett, Penn sat with the rest of the Council, waiting. There was nothing else to do. Nothing. The message had gone to the Valor. Ford, a graying sad-eyed man like a bloodhound, stirred in a far chair.
“And Norin?”
Penn shook his head. “They don’t know. He may not—” He made a gesture.
Ford blinked. Near him, Gerris, wiry and active, pushed his bald head forward. “Is it that serious?”
“As serious as—” Penn hesitated, shrugged. He could feel time passing, feel every second touch his nerves. “As serious as Thoth.”
They took that in silence. Only Forman Alpha moved, looking as stuffed and stern as ever he could, the enormous killing platitude springing to gassy life in his mouth: “He sacrificed himself for the people.”
Which meant nothing whatever. “I’m quite sure,” Penn said flatly. “But we can do with fewer sacrifices—and more sense.” Well, then, he’d let Forman Alpha know he was irritated; but he was beyond that sort of petty worry . . . wasn’t he? Or was anybody beyond any pettiness, ever?
Forman Alpha, who was beyond nothing, went stolidly on. “The sense of this meeting, then—”
“A statement in common,” Penn said. “Reassurance for the public. That’s all. It’s—quite literally— all we can do now.”
A door opened far away to his left; he turned and saw the Imperial doctor bustling in, eyes wide, his hair in disarray, the usual telltale box slung over one shoulder. A youngster, in his middle thirties, with a high reputation. And a man in what seemed to be a sort of panic. . . .
Penn said, instantly, “Yes?”
The others turned silent, attentive. Doctor Hampton brought himself to a disorderly halt, the telltale box swinging from its straps. “The patient—” he began, and took a breath, shut his eyes, opened them. . . .
“Yes?”
Doctor Hampton tried again. “The—the patient—” His arms flung out and clapped back to his sides as if he were a crane attempting flight. “The damned fool’s gone," he said, and everyone began to talk at once.
Penn said, “Gone?” and the doctor answered him, ignoring the rest.
“Just—” The arms again—“got up and left. Back to—the Dichtung chamber, or his own offices, at a guess. My God—”
The babble went on round them, and both men ignored it. “But—”
“Exactly, Sire,” the doctor said with a sort of wild
satisfaction. “It may kill him. You realize that.” He grabbed at his box, stared into it and looked up. “It would have killed anyone else, I think—an hour since. Or more. But—” There was a pause so long Penn filled it:
“Yes?”
Doctor Hampton’s voice was thin, tense, full of despair and uncontrolled admiration, very like pride. “Do you think he cares about that?”
21.
Yesterday they told you you would not go far—
Tonight you open, and there you are—
Next day on your dressing-room they hang a star—
Let’s go—on with the show!
—Irving Berlin,
There’s No Business Like Show Business.
22.
“I came as soon as I could,” Alphard said, but his mind was scarcely on the words; he rigidly controlled himself, instead, and sat quite still in the visitor’s chair to which Cannam had waved him, a chair so soft and large as to be somehow suffocating, enfolding, threatening. Which was, he knew quite well, ridiculous; the plain fact was that Cannam’s home— showy, screamingly bright, discomfortably and plushily expensive—was hardly to his taste, and that simply did not deserve contemplation. “Good taste”: well, he saw in the words the residence of Cardinal-explicator Jerrimine, and the severely simple home of his own childhood, and knew they were only models, only personal, only (in all strictness and insistence)
for the decision of the individual. “Good taste” could not, in fact, exist except in individual persons, one at a time; neither, he fully believed, could any other thing at all. This trouble about a room, a chair, was too small even for a man to mention to himself; but the thoughts would not be suppressed. He had all he could deal with in controlling his body; his mind would have to shift for itself.
And—well, Cannam himself, shifting, white and overweight, in his massage-chair; it was useless to pretend he did not react to the awful sight of Cannam. Why add hypocrisy to fastidiousness? Though the reflection which came to him provided, for a few seconds, a way out of the trap of his revulsion: When had it happened, after all? When had the flour-white makeup of the clown, familiar to all ages, given way to the idle, passionless prejudice that existed all through the Comity, the prejudice that made pure-whites, pale as milk, very nearly the only acceptable comedians—and, therefore, a more-than-even part of all the acting world? Pale and flabby and unpleasant to look upon; and there he was, back in the trap, facing that worried man sagging with self-ease, wrapped round in some enormous dressing-gown or audience robe of a multicolored dark stuff, thick and soft as plush. It was like staring into the life of a slug; and Cannam’s voice, a startled, whimpering scream, called somehow not for pity or understanding but for further dislike, further revulsion; Alphard set his jaw, listened, spoke, and tried to make himself believe that he was being—that he could be—fair.
“And you brought the jackals with you!”
“Jackals?” Alphard said, quite honestly shocked. Perhaps the man was mad—something could be done about Rachel, something would have to be done. . ..
“Quist,” Cannam said. “Quist, a man named Quist, even you’ve heard of him.” He was actually babbling—insane? Violent? “Now he’s outside. Right now. Admittance chamber, you know. I can’t hold
him off forever; you know I can’t hold him off forever.”
“But how could I—I don’t even know—” Not violent, no, but not safe either. Alphard remained still, trying to grab sense out of the whirling world.
“He followed you,” Cannam said flatly, and took a breath as deep as a drowning man’s, the instant his head breaks above water. His eyes rolled wildly, the eyes of a driven horse close to labored death. “He knew there was trouble. He knew. More than I did. I only—damn it—” A pause as short as a tick. “Excuse me,” Cannam said, looking sidewise at Alphard as if he had meant the phrase ironically.
“No offense, of course,” Alphard said, as evenly as he might. Cannam rubbed a hand across his thick lips, staring still. Around him the massage-chair tried to bring calm to all that collection of tensed muscle.
“All right, no offense, no offense, what do I care? I was working. How would I know anything about this—I was working! But he knew. He knew, damn him. Quist knew. And you knew too.” The mad eyes rolled and focused, crystal-hard. “Didn’t you?”
Alphard took a breath and then another. It was necessary, clearly, that someone remain calm. “I came to help,” he said in a low even voice, but nothing was getting through. Nothing. “I—came to see if I could—”
“You could,” Cannam said. “But you won’t.”
And then a silence. Alphard, blinking, said slowly: “What do—”
“Money,” Cannam spat, as if it were the filthiest of all words. “It’s money he’s after, you know. That’s Quist. Quist, the man on Thoth, so what else could have brought him here except money?”
Thoth? Alphard asked himself. How could he have led some unknown man from Thoth to this private suffocating set of rooms? “Surely he didn’t travel from Mars to—”
“Quist himself? No. Surely,” Cannam said, twisting the word painfully, “he didn’t. Any more than—than you actually led him here. But they all gather together. All the jackals, you know, they all gather together where the trouble is. You came.”
“I—” But there was no breaking in.
“And Quist—
Quist has arms. He has legs. One of those is out there waiting. You call him a human being. I suppose you do. I don’t care what his name is, I don’t care for anything about him, he’s an arm or a leg or an eyelash, he’s Quist to me, and that’s what matters. You can’t even know how it matters.”
A little meaning, a very little, began to filter through: sunlight in the deepest of rain forests. “How can you be sure—”
“Because you’re here,” Cannam said wildly, and darkness came down again. “Because Thoth is balanced on a hair, and if it goes I go with it: you understand that? There’s—there’s money in this, Churchman, and nobody argues with money. Quist wants out, that’s the truth of it; Quist wants out, and I—” Alphard cut in, hopefully, firmly: “I assume he has left Thoth, of course; in the present emergency—” Cannam’s face gave him all the comment on those two words he would ever need; the look would remain with him, Alphard knew, for life. “He wouldn’t have to leave Thoth, Churchman.” Cannam’s voice, which had not changed, was unexpectedly mild after that look. “I know. Shelters. There are always shelters, you know? And he’d have one, one of the best there is, he would. Believe me. You don’t understand this, so just believe me. He’d have the best there is. Waiting for me outside. Right now, damn him, right now!”
Alphard, lost entirely, could fall back only upon the darkest, oldest phrases in his memory: “I only wish to help—” and found them ignored by the foaming, flashing Cannam.
“Thoth goes, and finance goes. I’ve got holdings—all right, all right, you never mind about that. Holdings.
But.” He paused there, fixing Alphard with an expression of horrible intensity; what he said next, he said more slowly, more distinctly, as if the words themselves had real and even visible weight. “I won’t have any holdings. And Quist is going to want his money.”
He sat back, his head trembling, hands clasping and unclasping in the folds of that dark wrap (dark, Alphard wondered suddenly, in an attempt to bring him closer to the normal color of humanity?), and Alphard began to sort out a tiny proportion of what he had heard. This—Quist, then, was going to demand money at a time when Cannam could not pay it out. But: “Surely he would understand—”
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