“Maybe anti-Earth feeling is running as high in the colonies as anti-colony feeling is here,” Rayna said.
“Could be,” Marsden replied. “From what I saw when I was analyzing the messages, our fake colonists were sending phony messages to R-4 as well as from the Asteroid Belt. No way of telling just what those messages said in the name of Earth. Might have been pretty inflammatory. But the message about the zappers didn’t come from any colony. It originated on Earth. Then it was rerouted through the colonial branch of the CDN, so that a casual check would confirm the codes.”
“There’s something else,” said Milgrom. “Something that may prove just as dangerous as the ZAP miners themselves.”
Rayna looked at the CDN director expectantly.
“According to the message—which was sent to all Earth’s major news services at the same time it was sent to us—according to the message, the ZAP miners will be triggered by colonial sympathizers here on Earth.”
Milgrom didn’t have to explain what that meant. Distrust was already rampant. With this announcement, almost everyone would become suspect. One thing was certain: It would make peaceful contact with the colonies nearly impossible. Anyone talking about peace was likely to be branded an ally of the colonists and a potential mass murderer.
Rayna sank back in her chair, suddenly drained. “Then there’s nothing we can do. Tauber’s won.”
Marsden’s face went white, and his cigarette dropped from his hand. “Who did you say?”
“Tauber,” Rayna repeated. “Hank Tauber, I think. Or Henry Tauber. Something like that. He seems to be the brains behind the fake messages, the Nitinol diversion, Rensselaer’s involvement… everything. Apparently he used to be a lieutenant in some disbanded unit of the Merchant Fleet.”
“The Third Circuit, Fourth Asteroid Belt Run,” Marsden droned. “The Three-C, Four-A. My old unit.”
Milgrom turned to her assistant. “Did you know this man, Derek?”
“I knew him. We used to be friends. I knew he’d gone sour after the accident—he was hurt the same time I was—but I never figured he would....” He broke off and gazed down at the desk top. “I knew him, Althea.”
The three of them sat quietly for several moments.
“So where does that leave us?” asked Rayna.
In the ensuing stillness, she could almost see Milgrom’s mind analyzing the situation—breaking the problem down into byte-sized pieces and examining each one separately, then trying to put them all together once more.
“Where does that leave us?” Milgrom repeated. “It leaves us with a big job to do, but between Derek’s communications trace and whatever you can tell us about Tauber and his activities, we may be onto something.”
Rayna wasn’t convinced. “It all seems hopeless.”
“Tough, yes, but not hopeless,” Milgrom said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that there’s always hope.”
Chapter 26: Flies in the Ointment
Tauber pounded his right fist into his left palm and angrily cut off the HV reception. In an instant, the distinguished, gray-haired woman in the wheelchair disappeared from his living room.
“Bitch!” he called out. “Goddamn bitch!”
His body shook with fury, his gaze focused on the spot just vacated by the three-dimensional image of Althea Milgrom. At this moment he wanted nothing more than to strangle that damned cripple. He was on the verge of losing control, and he knew it. And that made him all the angrier.
Maybe she really doesn’t know anything, he told himself. Maybe she’s still just trying to placate the masses, just like she’s been doing since December.
But even as the thought formed, Tauber knew better. Milgrom had mentioned enough of the details to demonstrate that this was no case of wishful thinking or calming invention on her part; she knew about the messages!
True, she’d been singing essentially the same song for the past three months. Nobody believed her, of course. Oh, he was a little alarmed at first, but when no confirmation followed from independent technical experts, and Milgrom became increasingly isolated in her call to reestablish communications with the colonies, Tauber had stopped worrying and let himself enjoy the chaos he’d wrought. Her efforts seemed to be backfiring, and it was all working to Strong Man’s advantage. What was there to worry about?
Plenty, it now appeared. Now Milgrom had convinced the Secretary-General to try some experimental hyperwave communications system to establish real-time contact with the colonists. In order to get that die-hard, cover-your-ass politician to do that, she must have had some pretty convincing proof!
How could she possibly have figured it all out? Only five people were familiar with the code-switching technique Tauber used to scramble the Earth-colony transmissions. Jerrald, Kerner and Aldomar were in on Operation Strong Man and knew how to keep their mouths shut. Zeigler died last year when a new rocket engine he was testing blew up. And Derek Marsden might as well be dead. The last Tauber had heard, his erstwhile friend was struggling through retraining with little hope of ever finding a decent civilian job.
At the thought of Marsden, Tauber’s stomach muscles tightened into a knot, but he resolutely ignored the sensation and walked over to his off-line computer. Tauber had built the machine himself, making good use of his old Fleet training. As a free-standing unit that wasn’t tied into the massive Consolidated Data Network, it offered some definite advantages.
No CDN hookup for Baby, Tauber recalled thinking when he first decided to build the computer. I won’t bother the CDN, and the CDN won’t bother me.
But the CDN was bothering him. At least, its director was bothering him. She was bothering him a lot.
“That bitch!”
He flipped the power switch to the “on” position, inserted a disk into the computer’s interactive optical drive, and called up a report on the status of Operation Strong Man. All the key people were right where they belonged, doing just what they were supposed to be doing. Anti-colony incidents were increasing, and many countries had imposed tight restrictions on the activities of anyone remotely associated with the colonies. While there were no legal restrictions here in the United States, social pressures were just as effective in limiting Astie support. By now, everybody knew all about the zappers—and about the fact that somebody on Earth was doing the colonies’ dirty work for them. Despite her efforts, or more likely, because of them, Milgrom had become a lightning rod for anti-colony sentiment.
She has guts, he thought. I’ll give her that much.
He considered the situation somberly, his psyche automatically going into the failure-proof, pep-talk mode he had trained himself to adopt whenever self-doubt plagued him. None of this will do her any good. Scapegoats are too handy.
That was the basis of his whole plan: Give the people someone to hate—someone to blame all their problems on—and then provide the leadership that’ll “save” them from their foe. The technique had worked throughout history. Only Tauber wouldn’t make the mistake so many others had made. He wouldn’t turn himself into a target by identifying himself. He would run the show quietly, from behind the scenes. Let Rensselaer be the public hero. That was all right with Tauber. As long as Rensselaer remembered his place. As long as Rensselaer remembered who made him—and who could break him. As long as he remembered that today’s hero can be tomorrow’s goat.
We’ll move up the time table. Everything’s about ready, anyway. It would only have been a matter of a few weeks more in any case. We just have to make sure we do the job before they activate the hyperwave system.
Tauber narrowed his eyes in determination and examined some more data. You could cram an awful lot of information onto one of these new dense-pack optical disks. He had just about everything he needed right here in just this one small disk. True, he couldn’t pull other network records, or cross-reference material from different sources, or access the international communications system unless he tied back into the CDN hookup. Stil
l, he’d even managed to get around some of those limitations by copying CDN records to an optical disk. He patted the compact gray box that contained the computer’s workings. Baby, here, gave him computer power without potential CDN oversight—which was exactly the way he liked it. Power without anyone looking over his shoulder.
He instructed the computer to scroll through the display slowly. After several seconds, he froze the screen image, a personnel report. Right. It all looked good. Then his eye reached the last name on the list. Wraggon, Charles J.
“Fucking asshole!”
It took brains to program those robots so they would booby trap the Nitinol warehouse. Tauber knew that. He also knew that Wraggon was like an unsecured shipboard laser cannon with a broken safety mechanism. If you can’t repair the safety or lock down the cannon.... The confrontation had been inevitable.
***
“I don’t care how clever it was technically,” Tauber had told Wraggon, “it was a stupid thing to do!”
Wraggon merely glared at the taller man.
“We had a future together, you and I,” said Tauber, “but now you have no future at all. What did you think you were doing?”
Wraggon ground his teeth together before answering. “I proved we mean business,” he hissed. “I proved we wouldn’t wait forever for them to go along with our demands.”
“You also got the world too worked up too fast,” Tauber said coldly. “We’re not ready to take full advantage of the situation. The zappers aren’t all here yet. Once the entire system’s in place, we’ll have plenty of time—and leverage—to turn the screws. But this—” Tauber shook his head in obvious disgust. “Starting a rumor about destroying the Nitinol would’ve been one thing, but really doing the job.... Dumb, Wraggon. Plain dumb. I had plans for that Nitinol.”
Wraggon grunted. “You and your lousy plans! We got a great little extortion racket going here. If we keep the operation small, it could make us all rich. And like my grandfather always said, if you got the money, you can buy the power.”
“Is that all you care about, Wraggon? The money?”
“Like I said, Tauber, if you got the money, you can get the power. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? But you and your damn ego. You got to do things your own way. Well, I’m not just your errand boy!”
“I thought you were smart,” Tauber sighed, “but you’re not. No wonder you’re just a glorified rust-pusher.” Wraggon lunged for Tauber but was restrained by the bearded giant of a man who had brought him to this meeting at a remote spot overlooking the ocean. “No, Wraggon, you’re not smart at all. You have no real vision. Too bad. We could have used you. But now you’re just dead weight—very dead weight.”
Tauber jerked his head at the bearded man, turned and walked away. Only a slight hesitation of step and a momentary clenching of Tauber’s fists acknowledged Wraggon’s scream as the giant lifted the robotics expert and threw him off the cliff onto the rocks below.
***
Tauber blinked, and the mental image of his final moments with Wraggon faded. In its wake was not remorse but regret. Tauber’s Merchant Fleet experience had trained him to avoid waste. Wraggon wasn’t much, but he had certain useful skills. Killing him was like dumping a load of rocket fuel into space because it’s going unstable: You know it has to be done or you could blow yourself up, but you still hate the idea of losing all that fuel.
He rubbed his hands together and returned his attention to the screen. Maybe there was something he could use against Milgrom in her records, he thought. He’d already combined available CDN data on Milgrom’s personal, professional and medical history into a single file on the optical disk. Now he pressed a series of keys to access it.
How the hell did she figure it out? he wondered again as he stared at the screen full of information without really seeing it.
He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He tried to concentrate on the words before him, but his mind kept drifting. Not toward anything in particular. It was more like drifting away from something. Away from that vast emptiness inside him. He was so close. Milgrom or no Milgrom, in a few more months he’d have the whole world acting out parts in a play written, directed and cast by one Henry Tauber. This Milgrom thing was just a little glitch—an inconvenience, not a major catastrophe. But Henry Tauber despised glitches. He didn’t like having his timetable upset.
He gazed up at the ceiling, noticing a fresh spider web in one corner. Must be lonely being a spider, he thought absently, sitting there all alone just waiting, waiting, waiting for a victim to stumble into the web. He banished the reminder of his own loneliness. If loneliness is the price of power, then so be it, he mused bitterly.
He returned his attention to the screen. He hadn’t studied Milgrom’s complete file before. He’d constructed the file just in case it might contain something useful later on. In her wheelchair, Milgrom seemed the perfect symbol of a weak society and a vulnerable opponent for Rensselaer as he climbed the political ladder. She was proving much more troublesome than expected, however, and it occurred to Tauber that her file might hold some secret of value. Derek Marsden’s name was the last thing he’d expected to see, but there it was on a list of Milgrom’s assistants.
Tauber stared at the name for several seconds. Then, slowly, his hands curled into fists, and he ground his teeth so hard his head began to ache. The memories tore through his brain like a tornado, tossing his most closely guarded emotional secrets like balsa wood.
Derek had been his friend. Maybe his only friend. He remembered the good times, their times together as two of the five “bad boys” of the Academy. He remembered that awful day in R-4 when, his own cheek and ear burned by an errant laser beam, he had cradled the unconscious Marsden in his arms and screamed for a medic as blood flowed from the wounds in his friend’s neck. He remembered the softer, gentler Derek Marsden who emerged after months of treatment in the colonies, too. And he felt again the stirrings he’d long repressed, the desire to touch that thin, wiry body—and be touched in return....
With a savage sweep of his arm, Tauber cleared the top of the desk on which the computer rested, sending papers, manuals and a random assortment of unwashed coffee cups flying and crashing in all directions.
The sound of the doorbell was a welcome interruption to this uncomfortable line of thought. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and cleared the computer screen, then went to the door.
Keith Daniels stood in the corridor outside Tauber’s apartment, a troubled look on his face.
“Is all this part of your plan, Hank?” he asked without prolog.
Tauber, once more in complete control of his emotions, invited Keith inside. “Is what part of the plan?”
“The zappers. You’re not really going to—”
“Sit down, Keith, and relax. Of course they’re part of the plan. And with Althea Milgrom talking about how the communications have been faked, they may be the most convincing piece of evidence we have now to keep public attention focused on the colonies and off of us.”
Keith shook his head. “I don’t like it, Hank. Those things are too dangerous. They could take out a city block at the flick of a switch.”
“That’s the whole idea,” responded Tauber. “If there’s no danger, there’s no heroes. And we need a hero to promote for the presidency—or maybe for U.N. secretary general.”
Keith shook his head. “You’re crazy, Hank! I know you want to change the world, but—”
The force of Tauber’s backhanded slap caught Keith in mid-sentence and whipped his head sideways. “Don’t you ever call me crazy,” Tauber said in low, menacing tones. “Not ever.”
Keith put his hand to the side of his face and blinked.
“The zappers are weapons of last resort,” said Tauber. “Wraggon programmed the targets according to my instructions, and I selected those targets very carefully.”
“Are you sure about that?” Keith asked, finding his voice again.
“What do you
mean?”
“Are you sure Wraggon did what you told him to do? He didn’t exactly follow orders when it came to the Nitinol storage.”
Tauber glanced at the floor, then met Keith’s frank gaze with an ominous smile. “I guess we’d better find out.”
Keith studied Tauber nervously but said nothing.
”Althea Milgrom’s become a much bigger problem than I expected,” Tauber said. “I think she needs to be taught a lesson. And I can’t think of a better way to discredit her than a zapper attack.”
Keith went white but once again remained silent.
“Listen, Keith, don’t you worry about it. You concentrate on the lawsuits. We’ve got more cases ready to file now, don’t we?”
Keith nodded.
“Fine. You keep the authorities busy with the lawsuits, and leave the grand planning of Operation Strong Man to me. Just stay away from John Martin Roberts Park next Saturday.”
“The park! On the busiest day of the week? But—” Tauber’s glare cut Keith short, and the lawyer slumped back in his chair with a sigh of resignation.
Tauber wasn’t at all pleased. He had begun to regard Keith as a friend—his first since Derek Marsden. But like Marsden, Daniels was beginning to show weakness. What was that old saying about change? You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Couldn’t Daniels see that? What did the lives of a bunch of nobodies matter when a zapper strike on the park could put Operation Strong Man back on track?
“When’s Barnard’s ship due back from the Asteroid Belt?” Keith asked, trying to change the subject.
The question caught Tauber in mid-. “What? Huh? Oh, yeah. Barnard. Don’t worry about Vince. He won’t be coming back.”
Keith swallowed hard. “But isn’t his ship about due to—”
“Yeah, yeah. The ship’s due back next month. But Vince won’t be on it.”
Keith raised his eyebrows, and Tauber continued: “He was already a liability even before they shipped out. Once he found out about Wraggon, he’d be impossible to control. In his own bumbling way, Vince could unravel the whole operation. So I worked things out with two of his shipmates. They just happened to be old shipmates of mine, too.”
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