Jezebel's Ladder

by Scott Rhine

  ****

  Pandemonium broke loose. Everyone was shouting questions. Tom was making stretch motions for him to prolong the conference. Someone shouted, “Is it true Jezebel is several months pregnant?”

  Benny took a step back. “God, I wish. She’ll make a fantastic mother. Unfortunately, she has a rare disorder that makes conception almost impossible. We’re already looking into surrogates.”

  “Why did she refuse champagne at the wedding?”

  “The same reason I did. We’re alcoholics, but I didn’t need champagne to make that the happiest day of my life.”

  “Why was the conference so delayed?”

  Benny shot from the hip. “People here are afraid. No one is telling them what to say. I’m here because my wife’s last request was to support this announcement.”

  “Why haven’t we been told about this propulsion device before now?”

  “I can’t speak for other people, but I was being blackmailed into silence. That leverage ends tonight, because I’m telling you all.” And he did.

  After Benny confessed to the killing in detail, he collapsed into one of the chairs on stage. He was drained, but the animal of guilt that had been digging at his stomach for years was gone. Despite the sweat and white spots dancing across his vision, he could breathe freely again.

  Then, Normandy stepped up. “I’m with the FBI. I’ve read the incident report and spoken to witnesses. The events of that night have been ruled accidental, aggravated by extreme weather and other conditions beyond his control. Mr. Hollis did everything humanly possible to assist the victim and to make sure it was never repeated. So much so, he received a letter of commendation for sustained humanitarian services to the people of Thailand from the king’s sister, Princess Galyani. He also attends AA and church regularly.”

  While Normandy defended him, Tom came up to whisper in Benny’s ear. “One of the trucks tried to go around a cluster of illegally parked news vans and got stuck in the sand. We need more time.”

  “How many rabbits do you think I have in this hat?” Benny whined.

  Tom apologized. “I will personally nominate you for sainthood, but we need you to stall a little longer.”

  “How long do you need?”

  “Plan for thirty minutes.”

  “That’s not a stall, that’s a filibuster.” Benny felt in his pocket and knew how he would do it. “Fine. Hurry.”

  The actor stepped back on stage and announced, “While we’re waiting for the demonstration, let me tell you a few things that aren’t in the press packet. Can someone dim the lights?”

  He pulled out the star globe and showed them the location of the latest discovery—an ideal planet with many earth-sized moons, the first proposed target of their interstellar efforts. He padded the lecture with some of the script from his documentary.

  When the lights came up, there was no sign of Tom or Normandy. Then, he ad-libbed. “This is only the tip of the iceberg from our think tank. We will share information for free, but only to those countries and corporations that sign our charter.” He outlined Jez’s colony rules remembered from hours of dinner conversation.

  Reporters were swimming under the fire hose of information. The only question they asked about the charter was, “What’s a transparency officer?”

  “One of the devices we’ve discovered is like a permanent polygraph. We’re still working out the kinks, but volunteers at key locations in a company, about 1 percent of the population, would be unable to lie. It would be their job to report abuses of the moral code.”

  That woke them up. “Who would ever volunteer?”

  Benny grinned. “I did. It’s…liberating.”

  Tom appeared shaking the pinky and thumb sign for phone, coincidentally the sign language letter J—Jez. They’d found her!

  “Last question,” Benny said, eyes on the exit.

  “What are you going to do next?” asked the Times.

  Belatedly remembering his promise, the actor replied, “After Phoenix and my honeymoon, some people in California have asked me to run for Senate. We’ll see if anyone wants an old drunk who can’t keep his mouth shut.”

  This generated almost as much buzz as the previous announcements. At his elbow, Normandy asked, “So you agree to live by this code?”

  “Yes,” Benny said, feeling buoyant as he plowed through the throngs.

  “Ours has a clause about earning redemption through restitution. You might consider adding one to yours. We accept your answer. You may proceed to the next phase.”

  Then the person he thought was an FBI agent vanished.

  Chapter 52 – Daedalus

  PJ managed to find his way to the cots and catch some Zs. At about one o’clock, someone shoved a flashlight in his face. Bell asked, “Smith?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “There’s some joker outside by the name of Daedalus with an armed escort, demanding access. He says you know him,” she informed him.

  It took a second for the dime to drop. He didn’t know any Daedalus… except the father of Icarus—Nick! “Uh… yes. He’s a specialist,” PJ improvised. “I invited him earlier.”

  Bell frowned. “He’s not on the access list, and we don’t allow armed strangers inside the perimeter.”

  “I apologize. He was supposed to call me, and I was going to meet him at the gate without disturbing you. Daedalus is cleared. If necessary, you can run his fingerprints, but I don’t want anybody but you knowing his real identity.”

  Nick’s escort bothered him. If the gunslinger had been government-issue, he’d have been inside already. If the escort were a spy, Nick would be dead since his friend couldn’t be the leak. The most likely alternative was that his mom hired some muscle to protect her only child from the harsh cruelties of life, or to keep Nick from offing himself. “The other guy is his personal bodyguard. Daedalus doesn’t go anywhere without one anymore, not since the last attempt on his life. I can probably talk him into checking the artillery with your people. He’s the one who invented the device on that satellite up there, but the press can’t know about him, not yet.”

  Bell shook her head. “I can’t operate in a vacuum. You’ve got to tell me the whole story, no BS.”

  He looked her straight in the eye and said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Just as the vein began to stand out in her forehead, PJ added, “But Amy will give you the Senate oversight summary while I go out and brief our visitor.”

  Bell nodded grudgingly. “If this checks out from two sources, he gets in, but his real name goes in my report.”

  He put out his hands innocently. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  While she hunted Amy down like a bloodhound, the new liaison snuck out to the media circus to meet Nick at the fence line. He took a minute to recover from his first glimpse. Nick looked bad. His face was bruised, scratched, and swollen. One eye was puffed almost completely shut, while the other had a manic gleam to it. PJ steeled himself not to react as he took the sign-in sheet from the guard shack and walked over to greet his friend.

  “Daedalus,” PJ said, managing a weak smile. “Good to see you.”

  “Who was the traitor?” Nick whispered angrily.

  “Sure, we can talk. Over here is good,” PJ said, leading him away from the crowd. Nick moved slowly, with some degree of pain. The hired gun didn’t introduce himself. The guy could have been an extra in a biker movie, with long, black, greasy hair and a tattoo on his well-developed bicep that read ‘Roadkill.’ Without the tattoo, he could have passed for a cave man.

  Nick cursed loudly. “Who betrayed us?”

  “Nothing has been proven. The FBI has the last suspect in some local jail.”

  “Cocoa Beach?” Nick asked.

  Before PJ could stop himself, he nodded. Nick exchanged a look with Mr. Roadkill. “We’re really glad you showed up when you did. It’s less than four hours till the Phoenix makes its rendezvous. We can’t send the destruct sequence because someone changed th
e codes.”

  “Who the hell told you that?” said Nick.

  “Mr. Spacely. He just went to the jail, too.”

  Nick muttered, “I hope you’re jamming the destruct frequency.”

  PJ gaped at him. “Why?”

  Nick treated him like he was an idiot. “Because if it looks like you’re going to succeed, the pricks behind this operation are going to blow the satellite up and take all those astronauts with it.”

  “I never would have thought of that. We need you to come in and help us if we’re going to pull this off,” his friend said, trying to appeal to his ego.

  “Can’t,” Nick said. “I have some debts to repay before the night’s over.” Mr. Roadkill grinned and nodded.

  PJ grabbed Nick’s arm and whispered, “If we don’t succeed, it won’t matter. They’ll all be dead anyway.”

  Nick smiled in a twisted way. “My father used to tell me it didn’t matter if my food mixed together, because it all went to the same place. Well I want these people to taste every bite. I want them to feel everything I felt before they die.” Nick had never been the warmest person; however, now he was so cold that it burned to touch him. The Darwinian side of PJ was screaming at him to get away before Gloria’s prophecy could come true. Still, he couldn’t give up on a friend. The rest of the species needed what he knew too much.

  “Nick, you’re too important to lose. Paulson took all the Icarus documents with him, and Wilkes was killed. Nobody on our side really understands this thing but you.”

  “What makes you think I’m on your side?” he said. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Nick added. “Very well, for the sake of history I kept copies of all my notes.”

  “The, um, people interrogating you didn’t get them?” PJ asked, trying to be tactful.

  “They never asked, or I would have told them. Besides, the notes were already mailed to your parents’ house, book rate. I figured that a few weeks would be long enough for Big Brother to stop reading their junk mail. With those notes, any competent university could reproduce the results. I need the name.”

  “That doesn’t do us a whole lot of good right now. We need help with our plan.” PJ flipped the guest roster over and sketched the Icarus sphere and the tripod of ice. Drawing thrust arrows, he explained his idea to make the weapon into a spacecraft.

  Nick blinked a few times, turned the picture sideways so he could see it from the point of view of the Earth, and grunted. “You don’t need my help. If the fly boys don’t screw it up, this has about a one-in-four chance of working.” Nick grabbed the pen and paper and drew on the sphere. “This would be the basic engine.” He drew a pencil shape extending from the field and started labeling parts: water tanks, heater, controlled cooling tubes, ice-feed mechanism. The lines he drew to maintain proper ratios and the incidental equations he scrawled along the edges made the paper resemble a da Vinci sketch. For the ship, he made a dumbbell model with a field sphere at each end.

  Mr. Roadkill was bored, bobbing his head to a tune on his ear buds, while Nick casually explained one of the fundamental scientific foundations of the next century. “Velocity isn’t a big problem outside the gravity well. With a mass drive, the hard part is deceleration. Let’s say you achieve near-light speed.” He wrote equations across the top. “E=mAc2 is the amount of energy you get from perfect atomic conversion of mass A. The kinetic energy of a ship going that velocity is 1/2 mBc2 for the ship of mass B. Solve and you’d have to burn half the mass to go that fast and the other half to brake. Ignoring the weight of the passengers and engine, it would be a straight-line, one-way trip—not much of a TV series.”

  PJ nodded, trying to take it all in and ask the right questions while Nick was there. This was the future of Man, worth several patents, and he had tossed it off as casually as a memo. Because the math was still sloppy, the programmer argued, “Not necessarily. The mass is lower each time you fire, so it would be half of half. And that’s assuming you do it all at once and at full speed. With passengers, you could really only accelerate…”

  “Whatever. I don’t have time for Zeno’s paradox right now. Give me the name,” he demanded. As Nick’s voice changed, Roadkill took off his headphones.

  “But you’re a genius! And the NSA is probably guarding the guy. Don’t throw all of this away. If you get caught, they’ll shoot you,” PJ said.

  His breathing grew erratic. “None of that matters any more!” People were starting to stare, “They broke me, PJ. I stopped being me days ago. The only thing that’s kept me alive since then is planning what I’m going to do to the bastards before the impact.”

  His friend grasped at straws. “With all that Bible reading you’ve been doing, aren’t you worried about going to hell?”

  Nick shook his head. “You’ve been preaching the Dark Side for years now, brother. You’re even wearing the devil’s mark on your jacket,” he said, pointing to PJ’s new badge. “Don’t hold back now that I want to go the easy road. If our friendship ever meant anything to you, tell me.” When PJ delayed, Mr. Roadkill moved closer to him, revealing a knife handle. Odds were that he would be able to gut the skinny Quaker before any of the guards could stop him. Reporters were starting to gather around the corner, smelling the potential for blood.

  PJ didn’t see the rooftop sniper’s crosshairs on the biker, or the others moving closer to protect him.

  “Kemp.”

  Wheels turned in Nick’s head. “Good,” he said absently, and then left without another word.

  PJ told Buzz about jamming the destruct frequencies. He wasn’t sleepy any more.

  ****

  Daniel had located Jez from the air on their plane’s approach—the county jail infirmary. Trina wasted no time getting the information to Benny. The actor beat them to Jez’s side because Trina had to wait for her make-up and gun collection at the baggage claim. Invisible, Daniel stood watch over Jez until her husband arrived.

  Benny bent over the bed, kissed her forehead and whispered, “Take these broken wings.”

  Her eyes fluttered open. When she saw him, she smiled. “You’re supposed to sing it.”

  “You know I can’t sing; it’s my only flaw.”

  When she snickered, he handed her the purse. She could feel the butterfly calling to her. “All right. I’ll only stroke your ego because you have your occasional uses.”

  Seeing the panty liner in the purse, she looked down at the ground. “I have to tell you…”

  “I read your medical chart,” he said, wrapping an arm around her.

  Still sad, she leaned into his comfort. “It’s so weird finishing someone else’s sentence, having no secrets. Maybe we need to change our name to Jezny.”

  “Or Bezebel,” he countered, putting his name first. She pulled back and stared. “Bad example. I got a hotel room nearby, courtesy of your Assistant Corps. They’re amazing. I wanted you to get a shower, food, do whatever you need to do to get yourself ready before I introduce you to a few dozen of my newest friends.”

  Chapter 53 – Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God

  Time crawled by. At around two in the morning, Quan requested that the Pentagon ready all available missiles for launch immediately after the attempt. Buzz responded, “Sure, if it doesn’t work, we can try overloading the satellite’s defenses. Of course, we’ll want to give you time to get clear first.”

  Quan said, “Even if we succeed, you may need them. Whoever arranged this doesn’t like losing. Have you heard any more about who that might be?”

  Buzz sighed. “That’s a negative, Phoenix. We’ve been calling the jail for the last hour and we’re getting no response.”

  Then they had Quan do a sound bite for the news media. One of the astronauts had brought some of the air-recycling gear over from the space station as a souvenir for the space museum. “It doesn’t quite fit, but it’ll get us home.” When the broadcast light turned off, he added, “There, they love that mission in jeopardy crap. Phoenix out.”

 
Buzz grimaced. “I wish my stomach loved it, Phoenix. I’m going to need a new one tomorrow.”

  When PJ finally located Amy, she was a few buildings down, in the chapel. He could tell she had been crying. “Do you believe in God?”

  PJ nodded. “I think He’s a fantastic engineer.”

  “Do you think we’re being punished?” Amy asked.

  He thought about that for a moment. “He’s just letting his kids face the consequences of their own actions—helping us to grow up. I spent a night in jail once because my dad wouldn’t bail me out. It was one of the best things he ever did for me.”

  Amy laughed awkwardly through the tears. “Great, you seduce me and then tell me you’re a jailbird, too. What were you in jail for?”

  “I showed my scout troop how to hack into a mainframe from the school computer. One of my buddies used the tricks to get into a power company computer. A local hospital lost electricity for several minutes. Someone died.”

  She pulled back and looked at him askance. “Anyone ever tell you that you pick weird friends?”

  “My whole family, at every holiday gathering.”

  “So what happened with the jail thing?”

  He sighed. “I refused to fink out my friend, but I showed the company how to fix those security holes in exchange for a reduction in sentence. I got a sentence of one hundred hours community service at the hospital from the judge and two years of the same from my Dad. I can’t complain too much, though. Security consulting paid my way through college.”

  “I think your family sounds great. My folks are Catholic, but I haven’t been to Mass in years. I came here because I needed to confess.” She seemed very anxious.

  PJ laughed. “What could someone as nice as you possibly have done wrong?”

  That triggered a fit of weeping. “I lied to you.”

  He was suddenly more alert than when Roadkill had pulled a knife on him. “I’m not going anywhere. Go ahead.”

  “I implied I was a virgin when I got married, but only my husband was. I’ve been with a number of men—less than a dozen.”