“We might not be the only ones who’ve noticed there’s an extra hole on Remus,” Jay said at last. “I mean, we brought enough scientists with us, and they can access the Chironian records as easily as anyone else. The Chironians aren’t exactly secretive about their physics.”
“They could have,” Bernard agreed. “But have they? It doesn’t add up to the way Sterm’s acting.”
Jay shrugged. “Maybe he figures he’s got a better than even chance of outshooting them. Maybe he’s just crazy.”
Lechat had digested the implications by now and appeared worried. “Maybe the Chironians have given a warning, but nobody realized it. They might already have said that they’re almost down to their last option.”
“How do you mean?” Colman asked.
Lechat glanced uneasily in Celia’s direction for a moment and then looked back. “Howard Kalens,” he said in a lower voice. “Couldn’t that have been a final warning? Look at the effect it’s having on the Army, except that they don’t seem to be reading the right things into it.” He looked at Jay. “I can’t see that they’ve got it all figured out. They can’t have.”
Bernard sat back and drew a long breath. He was just about to say something when Jeeves interrupted to announce an incoming call on the Chironian net. It was Kath, calling from her place in Franklin. “I’ve heard from Casey,” she said when Bernard accepted. “He’s collected his package with Adam, and they’re on their way home with it. I just thought you’d like to know.”
Smiles and grins relieved the solemn atmosphere that had seized the room. From the direction of the table, Jean emitted an audible sigh of relief. Bernard grinned up at the screen. “Thanks,” he said. “We’re all glad to hear it. Talk to you again soon.” Kath gave a quick smile and vanished from the screen.
“Veronica made it!” Jean exclaimed delightedly. “Steve, I don’t know how you handled it all.”
“It pays to have friends,” Colman grunted.
“Congratulations, Steve,” Bernard said, still smiling. “I wonder what those guards are doing right now.”
“I’m very pleased,” Lechat murmured. Jay grinned, and Marie smiled at what was evidently good news.
Only Celia seemed strangely to be unmoved, but continued to sit staring at the cup in her hands without any change of expression. Her unexpected reaction caused the others to fall quiet and stare at her uncertainly. Then Jean said in a hesitant voice, “You don’t seem very excited, Celia. Is there something wrong?”
Celia didn’t seem to hear. Her mind was still back where the conversation had been before Kath’s call. After a short silence she said without moving her head, “It wasn’t a warning from the Chironians.”
The others exchanged puzzled looks. Jean shook her head and looked back at Celia. “I’m sorry, we’re not with you. Why—”
“The Chironians didn’t kill Howard,” Celia said. “I did.”
A silence descended like steel doors slamming down around the room. Those two simple words had extinguished all thoughts of the Kuan-yin’s weapons, and antimatter instantly. Every head turned disbelievingly to Celia as she sat staring ahead. Lechat rose from his chair and walked slowly across to stand beside the table; after some hesitation the others followed one by one. Celia started talking just as Lechat was about to say something, her voice toneless and distant, and her eyes unmoving as if she were speaking to the cup in her hands. “I couldn’t have spent my life with a man who had closed his mind to reality. You can’t know what it was like. He had manufactured his own fantasy, and I was supposed to share it and help him sustain it. It was impossible.” She paused to gulp some of the coffee. “So, the thing with Sterm . . . happened . . . Howard learned about it . . .” Celia closed her eyes as if she were trying to shut out a memory that she was seeing again. “He lost control of himself completely . . . there was a fight, and . . .” She left the rest unsaid. After a few seconds she opened her eyes and stared blankly ahead again. “Maybe I wanted him to find out—provoked him to it. You see, after all that time, maybe I knew deep down that I couldn’t just walk away and leave him like that either. What other way was there?” Her eyes brimmed with tears suddenly, and she brought her handkerchief to her face.
Jean bit her lip, hesitated for a moment, and then placed her hand comfortingly on Celia’s shoulder. “You mustn’t think like that,” she urged. “You’re trying to take all the guilt upon yourself and—”
Celia raised her head suddenly to look up at Lechat. “But I only shot him twice, not six times as the soldiers found. And the house hadn’t been broken into when I left. Don’t you see what that means?”
Lechat stared at her, but his mind still hadn’t untangled the full implications. Beside him Colman’s jaw clamped tight. “Somebody faked it to look like the Chironians did it,” Colman grated.
Bernard’s jaw dropped. “Sterm?” he gasped, then looked down at Celia. “You did tell him?”
Celia nodded. “That evening, as soon as I got up to the ship. I think I must have been hysterical or something. But . . . yes, I told him.”
Lechat was nodding slowly to himself. “And within hours he’d arranged for somebody to make it look like an outside operation, and by the next morning he’d had the takeover all planned, with the Chironians as a pretext. Everything fits. But who would have done it?”
“SDs,” Colman said at once. “It was a professional job.”
“Would they accept a job like that?” Jean asked, sounding dubious.
Colman nodded. “Sure. They’re selected and trained to obey orders and not ask questions. Some of them would shoot their own mothers if the right person said so. And Stormbel was in on it. It fits.” He thought for a second longer, and then looked at Lechat and Bernard. “There were a lot of suspicious things about Padawski breaking out too. It couldn’t have happened the way it did without inside help. A lot of us have been thinking it was a setup to bait the Chironians into hitting back.”
Lechat’s brows lifted and then creased into an even deeper frown. “And then there were those bombings . . .” He looked down at Celia. “Was Sterm behind those things too?”
“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me,” Celia answered. “I just know the true story about Howard because . . . because . . .”
“Does anyone else know about Howard?” Colman asked. “Veronica, for instance?”
Celia shook her head. “Nobody until now.”
Colman exhaled a long breath. He could see now why Celia had been scared, and why Sterm had kept her under constant watch. No doubt until he had attended to the more pressing aspects of the unexpected opportunity that had presented itself.
“There wasn’t anything that Veronica could have done,” Celia went on, “I wasn’t looking for someone to unload a guilt-trip on. What I had to say was a lot bigger than that. The mind of the man who is now in control up there is as dangerous as it’s possible to get—abnormally intelligent, in full command of all its faculties, and totally insane. Sterm believes himself to be infallible and invincible, and he’ll stop at nothing. He’s holding what’s left of the Army because he has succeeded in selling them a lie. And I was the only person who could expose that lie. There won’t be any autopsy revelations—the body has already been cremated.” Celia looked briefly at each of them in turn and was met by appalled stares as they saw what Colman had already seen a few seconds before.
“Yes, I knew I was in danger, but that was secondary,” Celia told them. “I still can expose the lie. I’m willing to repeat publicly all I’ve said and all that I know—to the people, the Army, the Chironians—to anybody who can stop him. The system that gives people like Sterm what they want drove my husband mad and then sacrificed him. There must be no more sacrifices. That was why I had to get away.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Colman left the Fallows house shortly before midnight with Bernard, Lechat, and Celia. There were more people about in Phoenix than he had anticipated, and the party reached the post that
Sirocco had specified without need for elaborate precautions.
On their arrival, they learned from Maddock that there was little need for them to have bothered making the arrangements with Sirocco. Border security around Phoenix was disintegrating, with most of the SDs being pulled back to protect the shuttle base, the barracks, and other key points, and the regular troops who were left scattered thinly along the perimeter doing little to interfere with the civilian exodus. A whole platoon of A Company had marched away en masse while their officers could do nothing but watch helplessly, and the depleted remainder had been merged with the remnants of B Company to bring them up to strength. More SDs were disappearing too. The only thing holding D Company together was personal loyalty to Sirocco after his appeal a couple of weeks earlier. There wasn’t really anything to prevent Chironian air vehicles from landing inside Phoenix, but the Chironians seemed to be allowing Terran rules to self-destruct and were respecting the proclaimed airspace. Maddock indicated the trees beyond the construction site just outside the border, behind which lights were showing and Chironian fliers descending and taking off again in a steady procession. “No need for you to walk very far,” he told them. “I can call Kath and have her send a cab over. What’s her number?”
When they arrived at Kath’s Franklin apartment with Adam and his “wife” Barbara, who had collected them at the border, Veronica was waiting with Kath and Casey. Colman already knew everybody, and while he and Kath were introducing Bernard and Lechat to those they hadn’t met previously, Veronica and Celia greeted each other with hugs and a few more tears from Celia.
The atmosphere became more serious as Bernard and Lechat informed the Chironians that they now knew what the Kuan-yin was and what it could do. “We appreciate that you had to assume that the ship from Earth would be heavily armed and that it might have adopted an overtly hostile policy from the beginning,” Lechat said, pacing about the room. “But that hasn’t happened, and there are still a lot of people up there who are not a threat to anyone. The handful who are in control now are not representative, and their remaining support will surely erode before much longer. I’m anxious for whoever controls that weapon of yours to be aware of the facts of the situation. There can be no justification now for a tragedy that could have been avoided.”
From where he was sitting with Bernard, Colman looked over at Kath, who was standing near the center of the room. “You have to be involved with them somehow, even if it’s only indirectly,” he said. “You must know these people, even if you’re not one of them yourself.”
“What would you wish them to do?” Kath asked, implying that Colman was correct in at least one of his assumptions without giving any hint of which. She had reacted to the subject with calmness and composure, almost as if she had been expecting it, but there was a firmness in her expression that Colman had not seen on any previous occasion. Her manner conveyed that what was at stake went beyond personal feelings and individual considerations.
“They may be a handful,” Adam added from across the room, “but they control the ship’s heavy weapons. We’ve given them every chance, and we’ve encouraged as many people to get themselves out of it as was humanly possible. Our whole world is at stake. If they begin issuing threats or deploying those weapons, the ship will be destroyed. There can be no changing that decision. It was made a long time ago.”
Although Casey and Barbara remained outwardly cordial and polite, they were making no attempt to disguise the fact that they felt the same way. Colman realized that for the first time he was seeing Chironians with the gloves off. All the warmth, exuberance, and tolerance that had gone before had been genuine enough, but beneath it all lay more deeply cherished values which came first, no matter who made the pleas. On that, there could be no concessions.
“That’s true,” Bernard agreed. “But the risk of Sterm trying anything with those weapons has to be greater if he thinks he can blackmail a defenseless planet. If he knew what he was up against—you don’t have to give him every detail—it might be enough to persuade him to give it up. That’s all we’re asking. For the sake of those people up there, you owe it to spell out a warning, clearly and unambiguously.”
“Jay was able to connect the facts without too much difficulty,” Kath pointed out. “We didn’t try to hide them. Haven’t the scientists on the ship done the same?”
“I don’t know,” was all that Bernard could reply. “If they have, they haven’t published it. But does it seem likely? Would Sterm be moving the way he is if they had? But you have nothing to lose by spelling it out to them. It has to be worth a try.”
Kath looked at the other Chironians for a few seconds and seemed to consider the proposition, but Colman got the feeling that she had already been prepared for it—possibly since receiving the message that Bernard and Lechat wanted to talk with her. Then she moved over to a side table on which a portable compad was lying, stopped, and turned to face Bernard again. “It isn’t a matter for me to decide,” she said. “But the people concerned are waiting to talk to you.” Bernard and Lechat exchanged puzzled looks. Kath seemed to hesitate for a second, and then looked at Lechat. “I’m afraid we have been taking an unpardonable liberty with you. You see, this was not entirely unexpected. The people you wish to speak with have been monitoring our discussion. I hope you are not too offended.”
She touched a code into the compad, and at once the large screen at one end of the room came to life to reveal head-and-shoulder views of six people. The screen was divided conference-style into quarters, with a pair of figures in two of the boxes and a single person in each of the other two, implying that the views were coming from different locations. Kath noted the concerned look that flashed across Bernard’s face. “It’s all right,” she told him. “The channels are quite secure.”
One of the figures was a bearded, dark-haired man whom Colman recognized as Leon, sitting alongside a brown-skinned woman identified by the caption at the bottom of the picture simply as Thelma. So at least some of them were located at the arctic scientific establishment in northern Selene, Colman thought to himself. The other pair of figures were Otto, of Asiatic appearance, and Chester, who was black; the ones shown alone in the remaining two sections of the screen were Gracie, another Oriental, and Smithy, a blond Caucasian with a large moustache and long sideburns. From their ages they were all evidently Founders. Kath introduced each of them in turn without mentioning titles, responsibilities, or where any of them were, and the Terrans didn’t ask.
Otto seemed to be the spokesman. He seemed anxious to reassure them. “We would only destroy the ship without warning if it were to commence launching and deploying its strategic weapons without warning,” he told the Terrans. “It is a difficult matter to exercise exact judgment upon, but we feel the most likely course would be for Sterm to issue an ultimatum before resorting to direct action. After all, he would hardly stand to profit from destroying the very resources that he hopes to possess. Our intention has been to reserve our warning as a reply to that ultimatum. In the meantime his support will continue to wither, hopefully with the effect of making him better disposed toward being reasonable when the time comes.”
“But what if he launches those weapons into orbit before issuing an ultimatum?” Bernard asked.
Leon nodded gravely from his section of the screen. “That is a risk,” he agreed. “As Otto said, it is difficult to judge exactly. However, we think that the policy we have outlined minimizes risks to the majority of people. Nothing will eliminate the risks completely.” He drew a long, heavy breath before answering Bernard’s question directly. “But there can be no alteration of our resolution.”
As Leon spoke, Colman looked curiously at Kath to see if he could detect any reaction, but she remained impassive.
Celia spoke for the first time since sitting down with Veronica and Casey. Until now she had not been fully aware of the reason for Bernard and Lechat’s visit. “Either way a warning won’t do any good,” she said. “Whether
you issue one now or later is academic. He would defy it. You don’t know him. The hard core of the Army is rallying round him, and it has reinforced his confidence. He thinks he is unbeatable.”
Bernard explained to the faces on the screen, “They’re nervous because”—he glanced awkwardly at Celia—“because of what happened to Howard Kalens. Sterm is playing on that.”
“That was unfortunate, but it was beyond our control,” Leon said. “I hope you do not believe that we were responsible.” Bernard shook his head.
After a long silence Otto looked up. “Then I’m afraid we can offer no more.”
There seemed to be no more to say. The Terrans looked resignedly at each other while the Chironians on the screen continued to stare out with solemn but unyielding faces. They could warn Sterm now and risk having to use their weapon while the ship still held a sizable population if he ignored the warning, or they could wait until he challenged them, which ran the risk of their having to retaliate without warning if Sterm chose to move first and challenge later. Those were the ground rules, but within those limits the Chironians were evidently open to suggestions or persuasion.
Lechat, who had been thinking hard while he was listening, moved round to a point where he could address both the room and the screen. “Perhaps there is something else we can do,” he said. Everybody looked at him curiously and waited. He raised his hands briefly. “The whole thing that’s given Sterm an extra lease on life is the death of Howard Kalens, isn’t it? Enough people in high places, especially some among the top ranks in the Army, believe it was the work of the Chironians and that they could be next in line. So they’re clustering around Sterm for mutual preservation. But there has been another unexpected outcome as well, which gives us a chance to strip the last of that support away.”
“What kind of outcome?” Thelma asked from beside Leon.
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