* * * *
8
W
hen the message reached Director Engineer Pierre Aulard at his laboratory in L-5, he had sat for a long while thoughtful.
It had arrived over a long-established Fireball communications line, secret, independent of any net, so safeguarded in every way that nothing transmitted had ever been tapped. The keys to the encryption were in the possession of very few persons indeed; those associates of Anson Guthrie who were his oldest and most trusted. Though brief, this dispatch was in his personal style, the like of which had not otherwise been heard for long lifetimes, and it made passing reference to bygone days that brought a momentary smile to Aulard’s lips. The burden was: “Prospects are more than hopeful, if we handle it right, but it’ll be tricky. I need my old camarilla with me, the gang of you in person. Together we’ll buck things through, the way we did when you were young. Remember? Say absolutely nothing to anybody except that you may be gone a fairish while.” There followed instructions for making contact.
His first feeling was immense relief. He had exploded in protests when Guthrie proposed to slip into that crazy North America and manage operations against the Avantists on the spot. What if they came to suspect his presence among them? What if they tracked him down? By comparison, his Alpha Centauri junket had been commonsensical to the point of stodginess. Guthrie hadn’t listened. After he departed, Aulard took refuge in work. Design problems of new spacecraft, they were something a man could give himself to without fear. Even the endless, niggling demands on him as an executive suddenly became almost welcome.
Now it seemed the jefe was at least partly safe and making ready to strike back in earnest. How, though? And what possible use could an aged technologist be? “The old camarilla—” why, that included Juan Santander Conde, retired with the honorific of Director Emeritus. God’s name, had the summons also come to Juan in Quito? And to whom else?
Nervous again, Aulard began to realize how little he knew of the situation. He had never been one for politics or any similar monkey antics. The business on Earth infuriated him, but he had followed events only in the sketchiest fashion. Seeking understanding, he went to his computer terminal and keyed for a précis. As it unrolled on the screen, from time to time he retrieved data concerning specific aspects. Finally he sat back, closed his eyes, and arranged the information neatly in his mind.
—After the Union government occupied and began to search Fireball’s North American headquarters, business was allowed to resume, under supervision. Company facilities elsewhere in the country functioned nearly as usual. Communications and personnel moved about, nationally and internationally, as needed. Meanwhile public disputation went on between the two sides. Likewise, but not covered in any detail by the news media, did negotiations.
Fireball wanted the militia and the detectives out of its main offices, immediately and unconditionally. The government insisted that it had taken action with the greatest reluctance and desired nothing more than to vacate. First, however, it must satisfy itself that dangerous subversives, perhaps terrorists, had not wormed their way into company employ. This was not a question of ideology but of prudence. In an era of fusion-powered engines, molecular engineering, and potentially lethal industrial materials, fanatics with access to the resources of an interplanetary organization could commit genocide, whether or not that was their intent. Fireball should not obstruct the investigation; for its own sake, it should cooperate. And since matters had come to a head, a number of long-standing issues had better be settled too. . . . The parleying dragged on.
Then things began to deteriorate. Service to North Americans was cut. Shipments went elsewhere. Proffered contracts that would routinely have been accepted were refused. Protests brought the response that it wasn’t surprising if the present circumstances caused a certain loss of efficiency. Fireball officers stationed within the country explained, quite honestly, that they had nothing to do with this. Theirs was not a joint stock company, it was a privately owned corporation. Most of its important divisions were affiliates or independent contractors, but only technically so. As close-knit as all were, by tradition and emotion still more than by spelled-out agreements, the ultimate governance was highly personal. Sr. Guthrie could doubtless set everything straight whenever he chose. But after issuing a pungent statement at the time of the seizure, he had apparently left the problem to his people in situ and their superiors in Quito. Such was his normal practice; he was no micromanager, but encouraged individual initiative. He had since withdrawn, and not yet been heard from. His whereabouts were unknown. This too was not uncommon.
When informally talking with government agents, company representatives grinned and said words to the effect of, “Certainly he’s putting pressure on you. What did you expect?” The measures were uncannily well aimed. The Security Police failed to smell out the source of those occasional commands. Fireball’s lines of communication were cunningly laid out.
Increasingly, voices rose, urging a break of the deadlock, even if the settlement meant the Union authorities must yield on every significant point. The voices were not simply those of businessfolk and ordinary citizens who suffered inconvenience—in several cases, financial disaster. Politicians spoke, and various high-level bureaucrats. Contrary to claims made by some of its enemies and many of its proponents, Avantism was not in monolithic unanimity. It never had been, quite. If nothing else, opinions often differed about the interpretations and the practical uses of Xuan’s equations; these arguments could develop into contests for power. As the years went by and the disappointments multiplied—goals unmet, economic difficulties, corruption, unrest, outright defiance, widespread indifference, spiritual secession—factionalism waxed. No public figure still resident within the national borders had, thus far, openly proposed scrapping the entire system; but more and more of them were saying, less and less circumspectly, that it seemed in need of modification.
Making peace with Fireball could well open a way to improving foreign relations generally and thence to internal reform. Three successive members of Congress said this from the floor and were neither denounced nor arrested.
Proceedings of the Advisory Synod were never public. Nonetheless, word leaked out that some members now favored such a policy. . . .
There the matter stood, aside from whatever Guthrie was doing. Evidently his direction from his secret lair had been successful thus far. Did he now mean to arrange for some spectacular action that would carry Fireball to victory?
Aulard sighed, shook his head, rose, and went off to make his preparations. That evenwatch he left the orbital colony aboard a regular shuttle to Kamehameha Spaceport. Arriving, he called the number that the message had given him, and in response got the address to which he should go. As ordered, he had traveled under an assumed name with appropriate identification material such as was kept in reserve for possible use. He went inconspicuously from the terminal, without a word to anybody who knew him, and took a cab to his destination.
Some fifty hours later, the Union government occupied every Fireball property in its jurisdiction. It announced that new discoveries about the extent of the danger made necessary this move and other emergency measures, but it trusted the crisis would soon be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties and of the human community at large.
* * * *
On the following day, three officers of the Security Police escorted Pierre Aulard to their Northwest Integrate headquarters and a sanctum within it. As the door behind the anteroom retracted, they stepped back. He passed through and it closed after him. Of course, they would monitor what happened, visually if not with audio, and surely equipment elsewhere would record in multisense detail.
A viewscreen gave a broad outlook over the city, as seen from the roofport. Clouds scudded on a wind whose boisterousness Aulard had felt when he left the flitter that brought him here. Sunshine and shadow raced beneath them, down the streets and across the towers. The bay sparkled. No noise penet
rated to the office, though, and its air stirred merely to the ventilators, temperature so well controlled that it seemed as devoid of heat or cold as it was of odors. Aulard barely glanced at the image before he focused on the desk and what stood behind.
That was a general-purpose robot, wheel-mounted. Its four arms ended in flexible hands but most functions were inside the boxy body or connectible to external devices. The turret had been modified, apparently a special job since marks of hand work were visible. Eyestalks protruded. When it spoke, the sound was not a standard tenor or soprano but a rough bass, English with an archaic American accent. “Hi, there. Welcome.”
Aulard’s fists knotted at his sides. “W’at are you?” he snapped.
“Anson Guthrie—who else?—currently wearing this chassis for lack of anything better. Good to see you, man. Care for a drink? I ordered Scotch.” The robot gestured at the contents of a tray on the desk. Aulard shook his head. “Well, whenever you like, help yourself. Meanwhile, sit down, do, and let’s talk.”
Aulard went to a flexchair. The robot noticed his slight limp and exclaimed, “Hey, you weren’t mistreated, were you? If anybody hurt you, tell me and I’ll have the sanamabiche strung up by the balls.”
“No. It is only sat at my age, one creaks under Earse gravity.” Aulard seated himself. “I did not make a fight. Sey ‘ad guns, and no witnesses.”
“Pierre, I apologize. We had no choice, but it was still a stinking way to treat you. Please let me explain, and then I’ll fall on the face I haven’t got, making it up to you. Are your quarters okay?”
Aulard shrugged. “As prisons go.”
“Look, I can arrange you a house off by itself—among trees, Pierre—with good food and wine, every kind of entertainment piped in, women if you want. Yes, and equipment too, within reason. You’ll have a chance to work on whatever you’ve been itchy to get at. Nobody and nothing to bother you.”
“Because I am cut off from everybody and everysing, hein?”
“Not for long. It shouldn’t be for very long at all.”
Aulard sat silent the better part of a minute, until he raised his white head and asked stonily, “W’at about Santander?”
“Well—” The synthetic syllable trailed away. The robot itself never stirred.
“If you did not lure ‘im ‘ere too, sere is no sense in ‘aving me. ‘E will soon suspect, and act.”
The reply grated. “Well, sure, we did bring him in. You’re right, we can’t, for now, have anybody running loose who knows . . . what you know . . . about the two of me. If that word escaped, all hell would let out for noon. I’ll explain why, and hope you’ll then agree this, uh, underhanded proceeding was necessary.”
Aulard looked into the lenses as if they were human eyes. “Nordberg is dead, Santander and I are prisoners,” he said, “but are you quite certain sere is nobody else? One of us could ‘ave made provisions.”
The tone went stark. “None of you did. I know. They deep-quizzed Juan.”
Aulard sat straight. Where he grabbed the arms of his chair, the knuckles stood hueless. “W’at?” he whispered. “Sat good old man, you drugged ‘im and put pulses srough ‘is brain?”
“I didn’t.”
“You made it possible.”
“Give me a break, Pierre. I— The Sepo handled that end of the business. They must’ve picked Juan to examine because they judged he’d be . . . easier. When Sayre, their head honcho, called me to say he was satisfied the secret was safe, but he’d like to run you through the mill just to make sure, I vetoed it. Christ, I’m glad I could! I told him in simple words of four letters what kinds of trouble I’d kick up if he gave you that unpleasantness, and he went along with me. But I hadn’t expected in the first place that he’d actually ... do what he did. I swear by, by Juliana’s name, I didn’t.”
“‘Ow secure is se fact anyways?” Aulard asked, unrelenting. “Plenty of people remember sere were two Gussries and one was put in storage.”
“They remember vaguely. They don’t know where. They’ve got no reason to guess it isn’t still hidden away. And pretty soon, if the question does arise, we can produce it.”
“Yes. Anosser copy, out of a different place.” Aulard considered. “It will ‘ave se software of se one sat did go into se cache, newly come ‘ome from Alpha Centauri, knowing nossing of w’at ‘as ‘appened since.” His smile twisted. “So it will be se real Anson Gussrie.”
“No, that’s me.”
“Anson Gussrie would never betray as you ‘ave betrayed. Many people called ‘im devil, but none ever called ‘im Judas.”
The voice was not altogether level. “Pierre, you know better than that. Identity is continuity, right? I’m as much myself as, as any other is.” Louder: “How do you know that I, the hardware inside this body, I’m not the same physical object that got itself smuggled into this country to give the Avantists grief?”
Aulard shrugged again. “Per’aps you are. It does not matter. Plain to see, sey ‘ave reprogrammed you. Castrated you. Even after ‘e became a revenant, Anson Gussrie was a man.”
The robot stood mute for seconds before mumbling, “That hurt, Pierre,” and took a moment longer to add, fast, “but you’re wrong. They entered new data. I’ve learned more than I knew and changed my mind about some things. That’s all.”
Aulard gazed into the sky. “I sink, me, you are not se one I last talked to,” he said slowly. “In sat comfortable prison room, I ‘ad time to sink. Wat ‘as ‘appened seems rasser clear. But tell me, w’ere is se real Gussrie?”
“Right here, God damn it!” Pause. “But if you insist, okay, my hardware here is what went to Demeter.” Softly: “Thanks to you, amigo viejo.”
“Fine sanks!”
“I told you I’m sorry I haven’t changed, not really. Haven’t forgotten anything, including my friends. I’m still me, Pierre. I remember—maybe better than you, after all these years—I remember, oh, that night when we received the Epsilon Eridani probe’s first transmission from inside the system, that weird planet it’d spotted, and everybody got drunk, I had myself pulsed so I could feel drunk too, and you ran a translator program so we could follow along when you introduced us to that filthy old French song about the three goldsmiths—”
Aulard’s hand chopped air.
“I’m still your friend, Pierre.”
Aulard looked back into the lenses. “And w’at of Juan Santander?” Thus might a sword have sounded as it was drawn.
Silence.
Aulard leaned forward. “Eh, bien?”
Very low: “I’m sorry. He was older than you, you know. He’d grown more frail than he let on. The quizzing killed him.”
Aulard sank back into his chair. “Murder.”
“No! Accident! Listen, Sayre wanted him revived but that was another thing I vetoed. I figured his brain would’ve been worse damaged than— So I gave him that much, Pierre, and wished these eyes of mine could weep.”
Aulard straightened and attacked anew. “W’at about sat osser one of you? W’ere is ‘e?”
Guthrie rallied. “You don’t need to know.”
“Destroyed? Mutilated like you? Or—bon Dieu, let ‘im stay free. Let ‘im bring you down.”
“That’s scarcely in the cards.” The stiffness softened. “Look, I had you brought here to this office because I want to spread the truth out for you to see. This is a tough time, sure, and a lot of what’s happened will always haunt me, but, well, we’re at a crisis point. The whole flinking human race is. Let me tell you my plans, and why I’m working on them. I want your help, your advice, so we can do what’s best for everybody.”
“You prove w’at you are,” Aulard spat. “Anson Gussrie, ‘e was sometimes a bastard, but ‘e was never sanctimonious.”
Harshly: “Don’t push me too hard, old buddy. I’m on edge as is.”
“Push? I ‘ave no wish to touch you. Let me go from ‘ere.”
The lenses peered, the software made judgments. “You mean th
at, don’t you? Okay. I’ll be in contact later. Meanwhile, follow the newscasts. Think about them.”
“Yes, since I must. Let me go now! Anyw’ere sat you are not.”
Aulard climbed to his feet and stumped toward the door. A signal passed, it opened, the officers outside sprang up to meet him. “Take him back,” the robot ordered. “Treat him kindly.” The lenses remained fixed on him until the door closed.
* * * *
9
F
irst it was to lift out of the area, never mind which way, at once, before the police could organize a really thorough hunt. A bus brought Kyra and her bags to Pittsburgh Central. There she managed a conference with Guthrie, whispers in a lavabo stall.
She asked him whether she shouldn’t try calling Quito, or perhaps some randomly chosen Fireball office abroad, on a public phone. The Avantists couldn’t have planted agents or instruments at more than a few points. Nor could the Sepo monitor more than a small fraction of communications. Let her convey the facts, then run and hide with him, to wait while Fireball acted.
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