Deadman Switch

by Timothy Zahn

  “Especially with Aikman goading them on,” I said, my voice trembling. “Sir, we may not have much time left—”

  “Easy, Benedar, easy,” he soothed. “They’d be stupid to jump their cue and kill any of the zombis until they had an official ruling in hand—otherwise they might wind up stuck here instead of us.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. It helped, but not very much. “I don’t think we should count on them to be that logical,” I told him. “The sooner you can get word of this to the governor, the better.”

  “Agreed,” Eisenstadt seconded, his voice grim. “And while we’re at it, let’s try a little legal offensive of our own. What we need to do is file a counterpetition, requesting that Rybakov grant an indefinite suspension of Paquin’s sentence until the Patri can confirm her service with my team here.”

  “And maybe ask that Commodore Freitag assign some Pravilos to take over zombi guard duty aboard the HTI freighters,” Randon agreed. “Certainly worth a shot. Unfortunately—” he looked back at me. “All that really does is block off Aikman’s easiest route. His petition is still the major problem; and coming as it does practically on top of your own request for a zombi, Dr. Eisenstadt, it leaves Rybakov the obvious move of combining the two by transferring Paquin’s sentence to whatever this jaunt is you want to make. Aikman couldn’t have planned things better if he’d had a straight pipeline out to you.”

  I sent Eisenstadt a sharp look; but he shook his head. “No, it’s just coincidence. Remember we didn’t decide ourselves until today that we’d even be needing a zombi.”

  Though there had been strong hints earlier on … but it was too late to worry about possible leaks now. “And there’s no provision at all for using a Solitaran Criminal?” I asked.

  “None,” Eisenstadt answered heavily. “Wouldn’t really matter if there was. Breaking that strong a legal tradition would mean her own political suicide—Solitaire would demand her removal, and the Patri would pretty much have to bow to their wishes.”

  But as one man they howled, Away with him! Give us Barabbas! “I understand,” I murmured, trying not to be bitter.

  Randon cleared his throat. “Benedar … the original reason you took Paquin to Spall in the first place. Did you have any luck at all with that?”

  Our search for a smuggler base. So much had happened since then I’d nearly forgotten. “No, sir,” I had to admit. “If we’d had more time—” I shrugged helplessly.

  “What about the Pravilo?” Randon persisted. “I’d think someone there would be interested in helping out.”

  I shook my head, Commodore Freitag’s face at our last meeting floating up from my memory. His face, and his sense of unbreakable determination on the issue. “I talked to Commodore Freitag before we left Solitaire,” I said. “He was uninterested in anything but a total solution to the problem.”

  “Uninterested?”

  “Violently so.” I hissed frustration between my teeth. “And I have to say that I agree with his reasons.”

  Randon grimaced, but I could see he was willing to trust my judgment. “I see. Well, you can tell me all about it some day when we have more time and a secure line. For the moment—” his eyes searched out Eisenstadt— “do you have any more ideas, Doctor?”

  Eisenstadt shook his head. “Nothing except what we’ve already come up with. I’ll get my counter-petition worked up and send word to Freitag about putting Pravilos on those HTI zombis. Aside from that, I can’t think of anything.”

  Randon nodded. “I’ll turn up what heat I can here and see what I can find out about unofficial HTI involvement. If I can catch an important hand in the cashbox, maybe I can force them to back down.”

  “Worth a try,” Eisenstadt agreed. “Well … I appreciate your help on this, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos. Good luck, and keep me informed.”

  “Right. Good-bye, Doctor.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Eisenstadt waved his control stick and the display blanked, and for a moment we sat in silence. Then he stirred in his seat. “I just thought you’d want to know,” he said, almost gruffly.

  The gruffness was a shield; but it couldn’t hide his genuine concern. “Thank you,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’d better let you get on with your work.”

  He hesitated. “Paquin is out at the Butte City,” he told me. “If you want to go and talk to her, I’ll have one of the Pravilos escort you there.”

  In other words, would I like to accept the burden of telling her the bad news. It was the last thing in the universe I wanted to do … but I knew it would be better coming from a friend. “Yes, sir,” I sighed. “I’ll do it.”

  There were a set of lights strung along the fences that enclosed the two-hundred-meter-long corridor between the encampment and the Butte City, but with no one officially on duty there tonight the lights had been muted to firefly level. My Pravilo escort had planned to drive me across, but the night was cool and quiet, ideal for a short walk. Besides which, I needed the time to think.

  It was the first time I’d been really outside after dark—away from the encampment’s lights, anyways—since Calandra and I had first camped at the buttes, and as we walked I found myself gazing up at the starry sky, a sharp bitterness swirling within me. Practically singlehanded, she and I had opened up mankind’s first contact with an alien race—found them, identified them, even discovered how to talk to them … and none of it seemed to make any difference whatsoever to the coldly impersonal web of laws which Aikman was manipulating in his obsession to destroy us.

  Us; because once Calandra was dead, I would be his next target. Aboard the Bellwether I’d forced him to back down, and for a man like Aikman such a goring of his pride was as deadly an insult as I could have given him. Stranding Randon and the Bellwether in Solitaire system without an outzombi would be a nice start to his revenge; in the time that would buy him, I had no doubt he would find the right thread to pull to wrap the web around me, as well.

  And there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  Like the corridor, the Butte City was only dimly lit, but there was enough starlight filtering between the cliffs for me to pick out the three forms standing near one of the gaps. Calandra and her two Pravilo escorts. My own escort trailing along behind me, I headed over.

  She saw us coming, of course, and identified me well before there was enough light for her to properly see my face. “Hello, Gilead,” she called softly. “Come to look at the stars?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  Her silhouette stiffened slightly as she heard the tightness in my voice. “What’s the matter?”

  I hesitated, suddenly very conscious of the strangers listening in. “Could Ms. Paquin and I have a minute alone?” I asked my escort.

  “I guess that’d be okay,” he said genially. Pulling out his phone, he keyed in a code, and the lights that had been strung around the Butte City brightened to the level of a fashionably dim room. “Take all the time you want,” he added. Signing Calandra’s escort to follow, he stepped back around the thunderheads.

  “What’s the matter?” Calandra repeated when they were out of earshot.

  I related my conversation with Eisenstadt and Randon. The words felt like molten lead in my mouth. “I see,” she said when I’d finished. Her eyes were focused somewhere past my face; her sense was dread combined with a strange calm. “Well … we knew it was just a matter of time.”

  I clenched my teeth hard enough to hurt. “I haven’t given up,” I told her. “Neither have the others.”

  She shook her head. “You might as well. It’s over.”

  “Calandra—”

  She silenced me with a look. “I never asked for this,” she reminded me quietly. “Never asked you to get involved with this crusade—begged you, in fact, not to. Please, Gilead—just let it go.”

  They have filled this place with the blood of the innocent … “And let them trade an innocent life for money?” I demanded.

  She sighed, and her eyes close
d briefly. “The powerful have always built their wealth on the lives of other people,” she said tiredly. “You of all people should know that—the Carillon Group has certainly done its share. Solitaire just happens to be a more blatant example than most.”

  “There ought to be room for both wealth and ethics in a civilized society,” I ground out.

  She shrugged. “The last person to try running a government that way was Aaron Balaam darMaupine. Want to trade?”

  I glared at her. “I can’t let this happen.”

  “You can’t stop it.” She took a deep breath. “But if it helps any … you’ve already done more for me than I could ever have hoped.”

  She turned slightly, her eyes turning upward to the stars. “You remember the parable of the talents?”

  To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one, each in proportion to his ability … “How could I forget it?”

  She nodded. “Me, too. The teachers at Bethel really drummed that one into us. You ever wonder—late at night—whether you were living up to their expectations?”

  I swallowed. “No more than a hundred times a year.”

  “Same with me,” she said. “I’d pretty much given up even trying; but it was always there anyway, somewhere way in the back of my mind. I guess I soothed it by assuming that when I was older I’d find something great to accomplish. Now, of course … I won’t be getting much older.”

  I bit at the back of my lip, and wished I knew how to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say.

  She looked at me. “Don’t be. Don’t you see?—this crazy quixotic quest of yours has given me more of a memorial than I ever dreamed of having. You and I, Gilead, have literally changed mankind’s history.”

  I looked at the sea of thunderheads, vague ghost-white shapes in the dim light. “I suppose so. Though whether we were here or not, it was only a matter of time before someone made contact with them.”

  She snorted. “Someone like who?—the Halloas? Come on; they were perfectly content to sit here thinking they were walking around on heaven talking directly to God. They’d never have made the connection by themselves.”

  From heaven God looks down, he sees all the children of Adam, from the place where he sits he watches all who dwell on the earth; he alone molds their hearts, he understands all they do … “Imagine the impression on mankind’s history if that had been true,” I murmured.

  “The thunderheads hardly conform to the popular concept of angels,” Calandra said, a touch of humor glinting through the solemnity.

  I smiled in return; and right then it hit me, like a brilliant flash of lightning. From heaven God looks down … “God in heaven, Calandra,” I breathed. “That’s it. That’s it!”

  She stared at me. “What—?”

  “Come on!” Grabbing her hand, I almost literally pulled her toward the Pravilos still waiting nearby. “I need a phone—quickly,” I called to them.

  We met them halfway, and a phone was handed to me. “How do I get Dr. Eisenstadt?” I asked, fumbling with the instrument with trembling hands. It was so blatantly obvious—

  One of the Pravilos keyed in the code, and a minute later Eisenstadt’s face appeared on the tiny display. “Hello?”

  “This is Benedar,” I identified myself. “Where is Commodore Freitag?”

  He blinked, clearly taken aback by the unexpected question. “On Solitaire, I presume.”

  “Call him,” I said. “Get him here.” I glanced at the Pravilos, looking as puzzled as Eisenstadt did. “And after he’s on his way, better keep this whole place incommunicado. We still haven’t proved Aikman didn’t have an information source here, and this cannot be allowed to get out.”

  “What can’t be allowed to get out?” he growled starting to grow irritated. “Calm down and—”

  “We need a non-Solitaran criminal,” I cut him off. “Right? And the best candidate for one is a smuggler. Right?”

  “Y-y-yes,” he said slowly. “Except that you said Freitag wasn’t interested in a solution to the—”

  “In a partial solution,” I corrected him. Couldn’t he see it—? “He wants to take all the smugglers in a single sweep, before any can slip through the net.”

  “And you know where they all are?”

  “No!” I all but shouted at him. “But the thunderheads do!”

  Beside me, Calandra whispered something startled and yet oddly reverent sounding … and Eisenstadt, for the first time since I’d met him, was speechless.

  Chapter 27

  IT WASN’T QUITE THAT easy, of course. The thunderheads had no way of distinguishing legitimate ships and settlements from smuggler ships and bases, for one thing, and it was quite a job explaining to them how to use human maps and skytracks. But with patience and computer wizardry on Freitag’s part and stamina on Zagorin’s, the job was eventually done. A week later, Freitag had his clean sweep.

  I learned later that no fewer than five smuggler ships were caught in the Pravilo’s grand net, as well as four rather cushy bases buried in the wilds of Spall. Unraveling all the entanglements—some of which were rumored to stretch as far afield as Janus and Elegy—and bringing all those involved before the appropriate judiciaries would take months or even years. But for the leaders of one crew, caught red-handed with a kidnap victim still aboard, the Solitaran judiciary authorized the use of pravdrugs. From those five men, two were chosen whose clear and willing guilt was matched only by their complete ignorance of the group’s business contacts.

  Guilty, but at the same time useless to the Pravilo investigation … or in other words, perfect candidates for filling Eisenstadt’s request for a zombi.

  I expected the judiciary to take at least a week to make it official. It took, in fact, barely five days.

  I’d expected the second time would be easier. Or perhaps merely hoped it would.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  The Pravilo doctor stepped back from the Kharg’s helm chair, returning the hypo to its place in his small case. My stomach a hard knot, I forced myself to watch as the dead hands lifted delicately and reached for the helm board. I shuddered—those hands could have been Calandra’s. They settled there; and abruptly the stars vanished from the bridge displays.

  “Deadman Switch in control, Commodore,” the man at the ditto helm announced. “Taking us out on bearing twenty-two mark four zero, fifty-six mark three three.”

  Freitag nodded. “Navigation?”

  The navigator’s hands were already playing over his board. “There’s nothing in particular listed for that direction, sir,” he reported. “No large planetoids or cometary bodies. Though that may not mean much—except for Solitaire system itself, data for this part of space is pretty sketchy.”

  “Which should encourage all of you to keep sharp,” Freitag reminded the bridge in general. “Wherever the Cloud generator is stashed, it’s likely to be either well hidden or well defended. Or both.” He swiveled another quarter turn. “Dr. Eisenstadt?”

  Standing beside the ditto nav chair, Eisenstadt leaned over to peer into Shepherd Zagorin’s glazed eyes. “Thunderhead? You still with us?”

  “I am,” Zagorin whispered.

  “Are we on the right path?”

  “Yes,” she assured him.

  I watched her closely, trying with all my skill to read past the words to what might be beneath them. As usual, the attempt failed. There were subtle differences in the sense between one encounter and another, I could tell now, differences that might be related to thunderhead emotional coloring the same way it was to that of human beings. But it could equally well be a result of Zagorin becoming acclimated to the contact, or to different thunderheads handling their end of the communication each time, or to any of a dozen other factors.

  Beside me, Calandra shivered. “You were right, Gilead,” she murmured. Her eyes, I saw, were on the body at the Deadman Switch. “It is the same. The same motions, the same sense, the same … everything.”
r />   She trailed off. I turned to Eisenstadt, to find him looking in turn at Calandra. His eyes flicked to mine, then shifted to the helm and Commodore Freitag sitting stiffly in his command chair. His sense … “Something wrong?” I asked quietly.

  Eisenstadt hesitated, shook his head. “Just … thinking. Wondering about … well, the logic involved here.”

  The logic of the Cloud. With all his attention focused on getting a zombi for this trip, Eisenstadt had apparently lost sight of all the questions and contradictions that had sparked this trip out in the first place. “I presume you and Commodore Freitag intend to move carefully,” I said.

  “Give us a little credit for brains,” he grunted. “I just wish the thunderheads would loosen up and tell us exactly what they expect us to do for them out here.”

  His eyes dropped to Zagorin’s impassive face, but if the thunderhead listening through her ears recognized the cue he ignored it. Zagorin remained silent, and after a minute Eisenstadt grunted again and gave up. “Anyway,” he said to me, “we should know within ten hours. Wherever it is they’re taking us, it has to be inside the Cloud itself.”

  I nodded down at Zagorin. “Are you going to have her maintain contact the whole way?”

  Eisenstadt pursed his lips, shook his head. “No, I suppose not. They’re not,” he added dryly, “exactly being fountains of information, after all. Ms. Zagorin?—you can go ahead and break contact. Thunderhead, we’ll be talking to you later. If there’s anything we need to know, you’d better tell us now.”

  Zagorin straightened slightly. “Farewell,” she said … and with a loud sigh slumped in her seat.

  Eisenstadt looked at me, a sour expression on his face. “Or in other words,” he growled, “they’re still playing it coy.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Freitag advised him coolly. “Whoever or whatever is out there running the Cloud generator, we’ll be ready for them.”