“We’re still the some people,” Jay said from the end of the sofa, looking at his mother. “That’s not going to change. If you’re going to act dumb, you can do that anywhere.” To Bernard’s mild surprise Jay had shown a lively interest in the conversation all through dinner and had elected to sit in afterward. About time too, Bernard thought to himself.
Jean shook her head, still refusing to contemplate the prospect. “But why does it have to be over?” She looked imploringly at Bernard. “We were happy all those years in the ship, weren’t we? We had our friends, like Jerry and Eve, we had the children. There was your job. Why should this planet take it all away from us? They don’t have the right. We never wanted anything from them. It’s—it’s all wrong.”
Bernard felt the color rising at the back of his neck. The pathos that she was trying to project was touching a raw nerve. He refilled his glass with a slow, deliberate movement while he brought his feelings under control. “What makes you so sure I found it all that wonderful?” he asked. “Aren’t you assuming the same right to tell me what I ought to want?” He put the bottle down on the table with a thud and looked up. “Well, I didn’t think it was so wonderful, and I don’t want any more of it. Today I told Merrick to stuff his job up his ass.”
“You what?” Jean gasped, horrified.
“I told him to stuff it. It’s over. We can be us now. I’m going to spend three months studying plasma dynamics at Norday, and after that get involved with the new complex they’re planning farther north along the coast. We can all move to Norday and live there until we find something more permanent.”
Jean shook her head in protest. “But you can’t . . . I won’t go. I want to move to Iberia.”
“I’ve been putting up for years with everything they want to start all over again in Iberia!” Bernard thundered suddenly, slamming down his glass. His face turned crimson. “I hated every minute of it. Who ever asked me if that was what I wanted? Nobody. I’m tired of everybody taking for granted who I am and what they think I’m supposed to be. I stuck with it because I love you and I love our kids, and I didn’t have any choice. Well, now I have a choice, and this time you owe me. I say we’re going to Norday, and goddamnit we’re going to Norday!”
Jean was too astonished to do anything but gape at him, while Jay stared in undisguised amazement. Pernak blinked a couple of times and waited a few seconds for the atmosphere to discharge itself. “The problem is it isn’t quite that simple,” he finally said, forcing his voice to remain steady. “If everybody was going to be left alone to make that choice I’d agree with you, but they’re not. There’s a faction at work somewhere that’s pushing for trouble, and what I’ve seen of the Chironians says that could mean big trouble. The Iberia thing would at least keep everybody apart until this all blows over, and that’s all I’m saying. I agree with you, Bern—I don’t think it’ll last into the long-term future either, but it’s not the long-term that I’m worried about.” He glanced at Jean apologetically. “Sorry, but that’s how I think it’ll go.”
Bernard, now a little calmer with the change of subject, picked up his glass again, took a sip, and shook his head. “Aren’t you overreacting just a little bit, Jerry? Exactly what kind of trouble are you talking about? What have we seen?” He looked from side to side as if to invite support. “One idiot who should never have been allowed out of a cage got what he asked for. I’m sorry if that sounds like a callous way of putting it, but it’s what I think. And that’s all we’ve seen.”
“Have you seen the news this evening?” Jean asked. “Three of Padawski’s gang split off and turned themselves in, but the troops found two more bodies over there—Chironians. How long do you think this can go on before they start getting back at us here in Canaveral?”
Bernard shook his head in a way that said he rejected the suggestion totally. “They won’t. They’re not like that. They just don’t think that way.”
“But how can you be so sure?”
“I’m getting to know them.”
“And I’m getting to know them better,” Pernak told both of them. Something in his tone made them turn their heads toward him curiously. He spread his hands above his knees. “It’s not exactly that kind of trouble I’m bothered about. But if this goes further than that . . . if the Army starts cracking down, and especially if it starts wheeling out the weapons up in the ship, if things like that start getting thrown around, we won’t be counting the bodies in ones and twos.”
Bernard looked at him uncertainly. “I’m not with you, Jerry. Why should it escalate to anything like that? The Chironians don’t have anything in that league anyway.”
“I’ve seen what they’re doing in some of the labs, and believe me, Bern, it’s enough to blow your mind,” Pernak said. “Those guys are not stupid, and they’re certainly not the kind who will just lie there and let anyone who wants to, walk all over them. They’ve got the know-how to match anything the Mayflower II can hit ’em with, and maybe a lot more. They’ve known for well over twenty years what to expect. Well, figure the rest out yourself.”
Bernard stared at his glass for a few seconds, then shook his head again. “I can’t buy it,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything or heard any mention of anything to do with strategic weapons. Where are they supposed to be?”
“We’ve only seen Franklin,” Pernak replied. “There’s a whole planet out there.”
“Ghosts in your head,” Bernard said. “Come on, Jerry, you’re a scientist. Where’s your evidence? Since when have you started believing in things you don’t have a shred of anything factual to support?”
“Gut-feel,” Pernak told him. “The weapons have to exist. I tell you, I know how these people’s minds work.” Jay stood up and left the room quietly. Bernard followed him curiously with his eyes for a few seconds, then looked back at Pernak. “But it’s a hell of a thin case for shipping everyone off to Iberia, isn’t it? And besides, if you’re right, then I’d have thought the best place to stay would be right here—all mixed up together with the Chironians. That way nobody’s likely to start throwing any big bombs around, right?” He turned his head to grin briefly at Jean. “I think Jerry made my point.”
Pernak remained unsmiling. “What about that ship sitting twenty thousand miles out in space?” he said.
Before Bernard could reply, Jay came back in carrying the landscape painting he had brought back from Franklin after his first expedition out exploring. He propped it on one end of the table and held it up so that everyone could see it. “Do you notice anything unusual about that?” he asked them.
Pernak and Jean looked at each other, puzzled. Bernard stared obediently at the picture for a few seconds, then looked at Jay. “It looks like a nicely done painting of mountains,” he said. “Is this supposed to have something to do with what we’re talking about?”
Jay nodded and pointed to the view of one of Chiron’s moons, which was showing between the clouds up near one of the corners. “That’s Remus,” he said. “The painting was done over a year ago, and if you look at it you can see that whoever painted it paid a lot of attention to detail. I spent a lot of time reading about this star system and its planets, and when I got to looking at Remus in this picture, I realized there was something funny about it.” Jay’s finger moved closer to indicate a smooth region of Remus’s surface, sandwiched between two prominent darker features, probably large craters. “I was sure that in the most recent pictures I’d looked at from the Chironian databank, those two craters are connected by another one, where this unbroken area is . . . a big one, several hundred miles across. When I checked, I found I was right—there’s a huge crater right here, and it wasn’t there a year ago.”
Bernard frowned as the implication of what Jay was suggesting sank in. “Did you ask Jeeves about it?” he inquired.
“Yes, I did. Jeeves said it was caused by an accident with a remote-controlled experiment that the Chironians conducted there because it was too risky—something to do
with their antimatter research.” Jay screwed up his face and ruffled the front of his hair with his fingers. “But that’s the kind of thing you’d expect somebody to say, isn’t it . . . and Chironians don’t make a lot of mistakes.” He looked around the circle of appalled faces staring back at him. “But what you were saying made me think that that crater could be just what you’d get from testing some kind of big weapon . . .”
Bernard, Pernak, and Jean stared at the picture for a long time. Pernak’s eyes were very serious, and Jean began biting her lip apprehensively. At last Bernard nodded and looked at the other two. “Okay, I’m with you,” he told them. “Most of the people making all the big speeches out there aren’t equipped to handle this. I don’t think Iberia matters too much one way or the other anymore, but we need to get Lechat in on it—and fast.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The first bomb exploded in the center of Canaveral City in the early hours of the morning, causing serious damage to the maglev terminal where the spur line into the shuttle base joined the main through-route from Franklin out to the Peninsula. Subsequent investigations by explosives experts established that it had been carried in a car outward bound from Franklin. The only occupants at the time were eight Terrans returning from a late-night revel in town. They were killed instantly.
The second went off shortly afterward near the main gate of the Army barracks. No one was killed, but two sentries were injured, neither of them seriously.
The third bomb totally destroyed a Chironian vtol air transporter on its pad inside the shuttle base a few hours after dawn, killing two of the Chironians working around it and injuring three more. Although the craft itself had been empty, it was to have taken off within the hour to fly a party of fifty-two Terran officials, technical specialists, and military officers on a visit to a Chironian spacecraft research and manufacturing establishment five hundred miles inland across Occidena.
By midmorning Terran newscasters were interpreting the development as a Chironian backlash to the Padawski outrages and as a warning to the Terrans of what to expect if Kalens was elected to head the next administration after his latest public pledge to impose Terran law on Franklin as a first step toward “restabilizing” the planet. Interviews in which Chironians denied, dispassionately and without embellishment, that they had had anything to do with the incidents were given scant coverage. Reactions among the Terrans were mixed. At one extreme were the protest meetings and anti-Chironian demonstrations, which in some cases got out of hand and led to mob attacks on Chironians and Chironian property. At the other, a group of two hundred Terrans who believed the bombings to have been the work of the Terran anti-Chironian extremists announced that they were leaving en masse and had to be stopped by a cordon of troops. Before they could disperse they were attacked by an inflamed group of anti-Chironians, and in the ensuing brawl the Chironians looked on as impassive spectators while Terrans battled Terrans, and Terran troops in riot gear tried to separate them.
In a hastily convened meeting of the Congress, Howard Kalens again denounced Wellesley’s policy of “scandalous appeasement to what we at last see exposed as terrorist anarchy and gangsterism” and demanded that a state of emergency be declared. In a stormy debate Wellesley stood firm by his insistence that alarming though the events were, they did not constitute a general threat comparable to the in-flight hazards that the emergency proviso had been intended to cover; they did not warrant resorting to such an extreme. But Wellesley had to do something to satisfy the clamor from all sides for measures to protect the Terrans down on the surface.
Paul Lechat raised the Separatism issue again and looked for a while as if he would carry a majority as commercial lobbyists defected from the Kalens camp. But the timing of the moment was not in Lechat’s favor, and Borftein torpedoed the motion fresh off the launching ramp with a scathing depiction of them all allowing themselves to be chased off across the planet like beggars from somebody’s back door. Ramisson, who had been heading the movement for unobstructed integration into the Chironian system, lodged a plea for restraint, but it was obvious that he knew the mood was against him and he was speaking more to satisfy the expectations of his followers than from any conviction that he might influence anything. The assembly listened dutifully and took no notice.
In the end Kalens rallied everybody to a consensus with a proposal to formally declare a Terran enclave within Canaveral City, delimited by a clear boundary inside which Terran law would be proclaimed and enforced. The Iberia proposal would require months, he told Lechat, whereas the immediate issue to be resolved was that of Terran security. In any case, it could hardly be carried out without an electoral mandate. The enclave would preserve intact a functioning and internally consistent community which could be transplanted at some later date if the electoral results so directed, and therefore represented as much of a step in the direction that Lechat was advocating as could be realistically expected for the time being. Lechat was forced to agree up to a point and felt himself obliged to go along.
Kalens had evidently been working on the details for some time. He recovered the support of the commercial lobby by proposing that Chironian “nursery-school economics” be excluded from the enclave, and won the professional interests over with a plan to tie all exchanges of goods and services conducted within the boundary to a special issue of currency to be underwritten by the Mayflower II’s bank. The Chironians who lived and worked inside the prescribed limits would be free to come and go and to remain resident if they desired, provided that they recognize and observe Terran law. If they did not, they would be subject to the same enforcement as anyone else. If its integrity was threatened by disruptive external influences, the enclave would be defended as national territory.
Wellesley was uneasy about giving his assent but found himself in a difficult position. After backing down and conceding the state-of-emergency issue, Kalens came across as the voice of reasonable compromise, which Wellesley realized belatedly was probably exactly what Kalens had intended. Wellesley had no effective answer to a remark of Kalens’s that if something weren’t done about the desertions, Wellesley could well end his term of office with the dubious distinction of presiding over an empty ship; the desertions had been as much a thorn in Wellesley’s side as anybody’s.
That touched at what was really at the bottom of it all. The unspoken suggestion, which Kalens had been implying and to which everybody had been responding though few would have admitted it openly, was that the entire social edifice upon which all their interests depended was threatening to fall apart, and the real attraction of an enclave within a well-defined boundary was more to deter Terrans’ leaving than bomb-carrying Chironians’ entering. Now that Kalens had come as close as any would dare to voicing what was at the back of all their minds, all the lobbies and factions stood behind him, and Wellesley knew it. If Wellesley opposed, he stood to be voted out of office. So he concurred, and the resolution was passed all but unanimously.
Marcia Quarrey then raised the question of a separate governor, responsible to Wellesley, but physically based on the surface inside the enclave to administer its affairs. Perhaps the division of authority between the members of the Directorate sitting twenty thousand miles away in the ship had contributed to the difficulties experienced since planetfall, she suggested, and delegating it to one person who had the advantages of being on the spot would remedy a lot of defects. Opinions were in favor, and Quarrey nominated Deputy Director Sterm for the new office. Sterm, however, declined on the grounds that a large part of the job would involve policymaking connected with Terran-Chironian relationships, and since a Liaison Director existed to whom that responsibility was already entrusted, the sensible way to avoid possible conflicts was to unify the two functions. He therefore nominated Howard Kalens; Quarrey seconded, and the vote was carried by a wide margin.
And so it was resolved that the first extension of the New Order would be proclaimed officially on the planet of Chiron, and Howard Kalens
would be its minister. He had gained the first toehold of his empire. “It’s the beginning,” he told Celia later that night. “Ten years from now it will have become the capital of a whole world. With a whole army behind me, what can a rabble of ruffians with handguns do to stop me now?”
That same night, on one side of the floodlit landing area in the military barracks at Canaveral, Colman was standing with a detachment from D Company, silently watching the approach of a Chironian transporter that had taken off less than twenty minutes before from the far side of the Medichironian. Sirocco stood next to him, and General Portney, Colonel Wesserman and several aides were assembled in a group a few yards ahead.
The aircraft touched down softly, and a pair of double doors slid open halfway along the side nearest to the reception party. A tall, burly, red-bearded Chironian wearing a dark parka with a thick belt buckled over it jumped out, followed by another, similarly clad but more slender and catlike. More figures became visible inside when the cabin light came on. Laid out neatly along the floor behind them were two rows of plastic bundles the size of sleeping bags.
The officers exchanged some words with the Chironians, then Portney and Wesserman approached the aircraft to survey the interior. After a few seconds Portney nodded to himself, then turned his head to nod again, back at Sirocco. Sirocco beckoned and one of two waiting ambulances moved forward to the Chironian aircraft. Two soldiers opened its rear doors. Four others climbed inside the aircraft and began moving bodies. As each body bag was brought out, Sirocco turned the top back briefly while an aide compared the face to pictures on a compack screen and another checked dogtag numbers against a list he was holding, after which the corpse was transferred to the ambulance.
Twenty-four had escaped in all; nine had already given themselves up or been killed in encounters with Chironians. Anita had not been among them. Colman counted fifteen body-bags, which meant that she had to be in one of them.
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