Starfire a-2

by Charles Sheffield

  Celine nodded. She was oddly reluctant to get to the point. “You told me once that you learned a lot from President Steinmetz.”

  “A great deal. I sometimes think I was frightened of Saul Steinmetz. No insult, Madam President, but he was the master of us all.”

  “I agree completely. He told me something many years ago, when he first suggested that I ought to enter politics. You’ve got the fame already, he said, and that’s half the battle. Leader of the survivors of the Mars expedition, no one has to ask who you are. You ought to take advantage of it. President Eisenhower had it, Saul said, and damn little else except a famous bald head, and he rode it all the way to victory and a two-term presidency. You can probably win the election already, but if you’re to stay the course you need something more. You have to be able to work with your enemies as well as your friends. You have to be able to work with anyone.”

  “Ah.” The dark heart of the storm hovered overhead, lightning-free. Nick Lopez had become a dark bulk with an invisible face. Celine could see him slowly nodding. Rain rattled on the roof and half obliterated his words.

  “That’s the authentic Steinmetz. He said the same to me when I took over the World Protection Federation. For some reason he thought I was prejudiced against foreigners.”

  “And you’re not?”

  She saw his teeth flash in the gloom. “Only Koreans. I hate those fuckers — but don’t quote me. Madam President, are you saying we have to work together? If so, I thought we already were.”

  “I won’t quote you. I’m going to quote President Steinmetz instead. He said that Nick Lopez pretends to be straightforward and simple, but he has the most complex mind in the U.S. Senate. He never works with a single agenda.”

  “That used to be true, but my Senate years were a long time ago. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore. I’m getting old, Celine. At my age people worry about their monuments, how they’ll be remembered.”

  “Nick, if you don’t mind my saying so, that is one hundred percent pure bullshit.”

  He laughed so hard that the car shook. Then he was silent for a long time. The rain was ending, and when at last he spoke his quiet words were hardly audible against the background grumble of departing thunder. “I have no children of my own, Celine. That makes my personal survival very important to me, because I’m the last of the line. I hate the idea of leaving this old world, and I take precautions to minimize my own chances of dying. But I also love the planet, and even when I’m gone I don’t want anything bad to happen to it. If I’m still around when the particle storm has passed, I hope Earth won’t have changed too much. I want it to be a place I will recognize and can enjoy. Things and people I know, familiar sights and sounds and smells, not some alien landscape. If that’s multiple-agenda, then I’m multiple-agenda.”

  “If you want the Earth that you know, Nick, you have to listen to the scientists I’m bringing in. You have to understand what they say, and see if you agree with me that it is correct and important.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re smart — everyone agrees on that, even your enemies.”

  “You want me to listen and give you a second opinion?”

  “No. I’ve had a second opinion, and a third. My senior Cabinet members were all briefed, and they didn’t buy what they heard. I want some assurance that I’m not off my head.”

  “Celine, I’m no scientist.”

  “You are more than you pretend to be. You cultivate a simple public image, but it’s bogus. You speak several languages, and you quote romantic poetry in all of them — but only when you think no one is there to record your words.”

  “Now you’ve been listening to Auden Travis. Never have an affair with the Vice President. Of course, he wasn’t VP at the time. He was just an aide.” Lopez sighed and shook his head. “What a beauty he was, back when I first met him. That curling brown hair, the sensitive mouth, that lovely straight Greek nose. And eyes to die for.”

  “Auden says nice things about you, too.” Celine knew that a second conversation was going on below the surface. She and Nick Lopez were feeling each other out, testing the chemistry. His presence was oddly relaxing. You had to remind yourself constantly that Lopez had a dark side to him. She went on, “The Vice President also confirmed my other impression of you. Publicly you claim suspicion of technology, but actually you respect science and scientists.”

  “Let’s say I believe, generally speaking, that scientists know what they don’t know better than most people. But they’re often wrong in what they do know. Or think they do.”

  The rain had stopped. The storm was speeding away to the east, and the soaked walkway leading from the car to the white pyramid reflected prismatic colors. Celine glanced back toward the airport. No planes seemed to be taking off or landing.

  “Wilmer Oldfield is a scientist, and a good one,” she said.

  “I believe you.” Nick was opening the door of the limousine. He had drunk not a single drop of the Calvados, and placed the glass on a shelf in front of the seats. “But I don’t know him.”

  “You do, from a long time ago. Wilmer was with me on the Mars expedition.”

  “Hm.” Lopez frowned. “Mars expedition.”

  “Nick, we’re alone. You don’t have to act dumb for me; I know you remember.”

  “Ah.” The head shaking changed to a nod. “Big, balding, sort of sloppy-looking? Sure.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  The analytical flash in the brown eyes came and went like the departed lightning. “He struck me as lucky in his choice of work. That much uncompromising concentration and focus is dangerous. If he’d picked religion as his business, by now he’d be a saint or a martyr. What became of him?”

  “He’s here. At least I hope he’s here. I want you to listen to what he has to say. I need help on this more than I want to admit.” Celine glanced again toward the airport. “Assuming his flight made it on time. It was supposed to land right behind us. But we sneaked in just under the storm.”

  “You should have said so. I can easily check.” Lopez left the car door open and queried the telcom set on the arm of his seat. After a few seconds he nodded. “They had a twenty-five-minute hold at the airport because of the storm, but now planes are landing again. I’ll make sure your friend is brought to us at once. We can go inside and wait.” He climbed out of the car, then turned back to Celine as she followed. “What makes you so sure that I’ll be willing to listen?”

  “You do. You say you love this world, and you don’t want anything to kill it.”

  They set off side by side along the paved rainbow walkway. After a few seconds Lopez gave Celine a wry sideways glance. “I also said I’d hate to leave the world. And you were the one accusing me of multiple agendas.”

  The ground floor of the building that they entered seemed even bigger from the inside. It was one huge, open plaza, with a floor of intricate marble mosaics and an inner atrium that became suddenly sunlit as they walked in. Curved escalators, of a design unknown to Celine, wound their sinuous way to higher floors. Nick Lopez nodded at the uniformed men and women who stood around without apparent function on the plaza floor and bowed as he passed. He ushered Celine onto one of the gleaming metal escalators, stood close behind her, and said softly, “I’m not keen on pomp and ritual, but it’s expected for someone in my position. I blame it on the South American tradition. Come down here sometime for Carnaval.”

  Celine wondered: If you were the boss, couldn’t you control the amount of bowing and scraping? Then she reflected. She had not been able to stop people fawning and groveling, or installing extra features in her office that she neither needed nor wanted. Why should Nick Lopez be able to do any better?

  The office that they came to on the third floor at first suggested that Nick was no different. His name and title were embossed in gold on the outer door. The room beyond was vast and sumptuously furnished. Its floor was covered with a deep-piled Persian rug, and
every wall held paintings that looked both genuine and old.

  Farther on, however, deep in the interior of the suite, they entered Nick’s private office. There was no name on the door. The furniture was simple, almost spartan, with one terminal, one desk, and two chairs. The four walls held one picture each, three of them watercolors and one a black-and-white photograph. On the desk sat one telcom, with a red, single-purpose handset with no video unit next to it. The set was beeping as Nick ushered Celine into the room.

  “Damnation.” Nick walked across and picked up the handset. “I told my people to hold all calls, but this one bypasses the general circuits and comes straight to my office. Excuse me for a moment.”

  He spoke into the unit. “Yes? . . . Yes, it’s just the way I told you it would be. It rings only here, in my private office. If I’m not here, no one else will answer. And it makes no recording.”

  He paused for a few seconds, then said, “Well, that’s true, if you call and I’m not here, you’ll have no way to get a message to me. But that’s the way we agreed to do it. I hope it’s the same at your end. I don’t want to be making broadcasts when I talk to you. Are you underground or at your other place?”

  Lopez shot Celine a quick glance as he spoke the final sentence. She walked across to the wall and made a big show of studying one of the watercolors. She was no artist, but she had seen the picture somewhere before. It was famous — and this looked very like the original.

  She moved to the wall on her left and examined the black-and-white picture. The man in it was familiar, though this shot seemed different from any photograph that she had ever seen. Was this maybe Lopez’s brother? The man was young, very tall, big-nosed, grinning, and wearing a Stetson hat.

  Behind her, Nick Lopez was saying, “I’ll call you back, and we’ll make sure this is two-way. But I can’t do it now — I have visitors.” He winked at Celine as she turned around, and spoke again into the set. “Well, as a matter of fact, it’s one visitor, if you know what I mean. So this isn’t a good time for you and me to talk . . . Sure. We can do that. Later.”

  He dropped the handset back into its cradle. “There. That’s how a man’s reputation gets ruined. Take my advice, Celine, and never put in a scrambled private line.”

  “I never will. I don’t believe there is any such thing as an unbreakable ciphered message.”

  “I’m inclined to agree. But an associate insisted on a direct line between us, person to person. So now we have one.” Lopez nodded to the photograph on the wall behind Celine. “I saw you studying him. You know who he is, don’t you?”

  “I think so, but he looks so young. It’s Lyndon Baines Johnson, isn’t it? President Johnson.”

  “No. It’s LBJ all right, but that’s Senator Johnson, before he became President. The person you are looking at was a much greater and wiser man than President Johnson.”

  “I didn’t know you were an admirer of LBJ.” Celine was genuinely astonished. Nick Lopez was not the person to have pictures of personal idols on the office wall.

  “I’m not his admirer.” Nick came to stand beside her and studied the picture. “He’s there to remind me of something important. LBJ knew how to run the U.S. Senate better than anybody, ever. He could squeeze and coax and reward and punish, and he got just about anything he wanted. Then he became President, and he was a disaster. His ego was too big. He wouldn’t admit when he was wrong. He got stuck in a war that he couldn’t control, and now people look back on him as one of the worst U.S. Presidents. I keep him there because I believe that you can learn more from failure than you can from success. LBJ sent my grandfather off to war, and killed him. So I hate the son of a bitch. But I also know that he was once a great, great Senator. Past success doesn’t guarantee future success, and you can do one thing very well and another very badly.” Lopez stared at Celine, who was smiling. “Which part do you think is funny?”

  “None of it. I smile because I’m like you. I keep a holo display just for me in the corner of the Oval Office.”

  “The way that Saul Steinmetz had one of Disraeli? But I’ve never seen yours.”

  “You never will. I only turn it on when I’m alone, and I don’t show it to anyone. I daren’t. Want to make a guess as to who it is?”

  “Well, with those rules it can’t be Saul, though I know he’s your hero.” Nick puffed out his cheeks and frowned in thought. “I’ll skip the obvious guesses, because you wouldn’t hide any of the Presidents. I’ll bite. Who?”

  “I have a hologram of Adolf Hitler.”

  “Hitler! Why not Pontius Pilate? That’s heavy stuff.” Lopez wandered over to the desk and sat at the chair behind it. He placed his elbows on the uncluttered top and cupped his chin in his hands. “Not my guess as to your first choice — or your second, third, or fiftieth.”

  “Want to know why he’s there?”

  “No. Not yet. Let me think. Isn’t that what you want me to do?” He sat silent, staring straight ahead. Celine caught a glimpse of another Nick Lopez, a man as concentrated and tightly focused as Wilmer Oldfield.

  “Obviously it’s not because you admire him,” he said after a few seconds. The telcom unit on the desk was beeping again, but he ignored it. “And my picture of Lyndon Johnson must have something to do with it. He’s there to remind you that you must never forget something. But what? All right. I give up.”

  “It’s not as direct a reminder as yours. Hitler’s my symbol for the analogy between today and the state of the world a hundred and twenty years ago. In the 1920s, everyone knew that they had been through a terrible disaster. The world war had been frightful, but they had survived and it was over and everything was peaceful. The ’war to end wars,’ they called it, and it seemed part of the past. Only a few people recognized that there was trouble ahead. Hitler was ahead, just a few years away. But most people took no notice of the danger signals. They didn’t prepare for trouble until it was too late.”

  Lopez had walked across to stand by the desk. He had his hand poised over the telcom unit, but he did not touch it. He said, “The supernova was our First World War. We survived it. Now we’re between disasters, but most people don’t understand how much trouble we’re in. Half of them don’t even believe in the particle storm. We have the equivalent of a Second World War in our future. Right?”

  “We do. We have to learn from history.”

  ” ’Ancestral voices prophesying war.’ ” Lopez nodded and pressed the telcom switch. “Yes?”

  “The other visitors from the United States are here.”

  “Bring them in.” Lopez raised an eyebrow at Celine. “Visitors? More than one?”

  “I don’t know.” Celine stared blankly at Lopez, then toward the half-open door. “It should just be Wilmer. Unless — he’d better not, I told him—”

  She was speechless. The open doorway was empty no longer. A black hand had appeared around the edge of the door. It was followed a moment later by a black, grinning face.

  Celine realized again what she had first learned thirty-odd years ago: What you told Wilmer to do and what Wilmer did were not always the same.

  14

  Nick Lopez had a reputation of being a bad listener, someone who in the middle of a meeting would fiddle with papers, start reading an unrelated document, or even leave and not return. Celine found it hard to match that to Saul Steinmetz’s comment that Nick had possessed the most subtle and complex mind in Washington. Now, half an hour into the meeting, she thought she could reconcile the two.

  Nick had received Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander politely. He seemed secretly pleased by Celine’s irritation at Astarte’s presence. When the introductions were over he sat down at once, nodded to the newcomers, and said, “Your ball. Talk.”

  Apparently Wilmer and Astarte had agreed in advance that Wilmer would be the spokesman. Being Wilmer, he of course favored completeness over brevity. Celine watched and listened as he carefully explained two different types of supernova, and how the Alpha Cent
auri binary system, according to long-established theories, could not possibly belong to either class. He pointed out, as though it were news to Nick Lopez, that Alpha Centauri had in fact become a supernova; then that no one had been able to explain how this might happen until recently; but now a new theory, based on original work by Astarte as modified by Wilmer, provided a full explanation.

  Wilmer outlined the new ideas and defined the pattern of compressions that must have been applied to Alpha Centauri A, the larger star of the system, to induce a supernova explosion. He spoke clearly, but certainly not simply. Celine had to concentrate to follow, and she had heard it several times before. While he spoke Astarte sat cross-legged on the floor, grinned up at Nick Lopez, and unselfconsciously scratched her belly and bare thighs.

  Nick did not seem upset at that. He listened closely to Wilmer’s every word, and when Wilmer talked of stellar resonance Nick nodded as though that idea was no more than common sense. He did not fidget, and he ignored the occasional beeping of the telcom unit. Twice he asked for additional details. Once he asked that a subtle point be repeated.

  Celine decided that Saul was right. Nick Lopez was very smart. But in nine meetings out of ten he was bored, and that was when he wandered off to do other things.

  Wilmer had reached the most controversial point in the presentation, the one that the Cabinet officers and government research heads had rejected out of hand. “So the compressive pulses couldn’t have occurred naturally,” he said. “They were induced by some other agent. That, and the fact that the directions of both the gamma-ray beam and the particle storm precisely intersect the solar system, indicate that the geometry for this event was arranged.”

  “Arranged?” Lopez was frowning.

  “Deliberately contrived. It didn’t just happen.”

  This was the point where Wilmer was supposed to end the presentation, as he had ended it before. Celine was ready to defend his heretical suggestion of supernova intention when Wilmer nodded to Astarte and said, “That’s me done. Your turn up the gum tree.”