by Neal Asher
Lanier was stunned. He had thought security aboard the Stone—certainly around the libraries—was extremely tight.
Would he be held responsible for such a hideous leak—or was the leak from another source, perhaps the President's office, or Hoffman's?
"This is a highly unusual situation," Feodorovski continued. "Frankly, my colleagues and I have a difficult time believing we are not living a fairy tale." The other three nodded, not quite in unison. "But these reports are reliable.
What do you have to say about them?"
"The libraries have been approached cautiously," Hague said. "We've just begun to process the information stored there."
Feodorovski looked up at the ceiling, exasperated. "We have pledged to speak frankly with each other. My government knows such information exists in the libraries. In fact, we are certain that the accounts of this future war are already in the hands of your President."
He looked around the table. Lanier met his gaze steadily and noticed a flicker of smile on his lips. "Yes," Feodorovski said. "We know, of course, that humans built the Stone, or will build it, centuries from now. We know that it will be constructed from the asteroid known as Juno. We know this because in every particular the asteroid Juno and the Stone are identical. Our spacecraft in the asteroid belt has confirmed this."
"Mr. Feodorovski, we are dealing with a very unusual problem," Hoffman said. "We are certain that the Stone does not come from our universe, but from an alternate universe. We strongly believe that the information contained in the libraries could be misinterpreted. They may not predict conditions in our world in any way. The scientific data could be useful, and we are studying that closely, but releasing information haphazardly could be disastrous."
"Nevertheless, there is such a history."
Cronberry said, "If there is, we are not privy to it."
Lanier felt his heart sink. He hated lies, even necessary lies. He hated being a party to lies. Yet he no more wanted the Russians to get the information in the libraries than Cronberry and Hague. That made him a liar.
The Russian seated closest to Feodorovski—Yuri Kerzhinsky—leaned over to whisper in his ear. Feodorovski nodded.
"Mr. Lanier," he said, "do you deny the existence of this information?"
"I don't know anything about it," Lanier said smoothly.
"But you concede, do you not, that if such information exists, being aware of it, knowing certain dates, even certain hours, knowing the situations and consequences in advance would be of great strategic value, and also would put a very great strain on you individually?"
"I imagine it would," Lanier said.
Hague interrupted. "Mr. Lanier is not to be badgered—"
"Very sorry," Feodorovski said. "My apologies. But our concern is larger than individual politenesses."
Kerzhinsky stood up abruptly. "Gentlemen. You realize there is now very grave tension between our nations, perhaps the gravest since the 1990s. It is our opinion that troubles aboard the Stone are jeopardizing world peace. The Stone is increasing tensions, particularly with regard to this issue about libraries. It is obvious that we cannot resolve these difficulties at this level of dialogue. Therefore, I see no further need for discussion here."
"Mr. Kerzhinsky," Hoffman said. "I have a paper here I believe your Party Secretary should see. It states the position of all the scientists aboard the Stone with regard to cooperation. And I think it clarifies the rumors of harassment."
Kerzhinsky shook his head and tapped his forefinger on the table several times. "We are no longer interested in such posturings. Harassment is not the issue. The libraries are the issue. Talks are proceeding at a formal level right now. We can only hope for better results there." The four stood and Hague escorted them to the door.
Outside the door, a secret service agent took them in charge. Hague closed the door and turned back to the others. "That," he said, "is that."
"Makes me sick," Lanier said in an undertone.
"Oh?" Cronberry said, rising halfway from her seat. "And what would you have us do, Mr. Lanier? You're the one responsible, you know that? You didn't keep a tight rein on security, and now we have this mess ... this goddamn diplomatic catastrophe. Why did you ever open the libraries in the first place? Couldn't you just smell the trouble
they'd cause? I would have smelled it, by God. The whole place must reek."
"Shut up, Alice," Hoffman said quietly. "Stop behaving like an ass."
Cronberry glared at them all, then sat down and lit a cigarette. The way she fumbled at the lighter and clenched the cigarette between tight fingers made Lanier queasy. We're way out of our depth here, he thought. Children playing with real guns, real bullets.
"The President called yesterday," Hoffman said. "He's very angry about the libraries. He wants them closed and all research halted. He says we've let things get out of control, and I can't really disagree with him. Garry is no more to blame than any of us. At any rate, the President is going to order the Stone Congressional Oversight Committee to put all research on hold until further notice. The Russians are going to get what they want."
"How long do we have?" Lanier asked.
"Until the order goes through channels? A week, probably."
Lanier grinned and shook his head.
"What's there to be amused about?" Cronberry asked coldly, wrapped in a loose shell of smoke.
"The records say we have two weeks before the war."
Hoffman invited Lanier to her office for drinks that evening. He arrived at seven, after a quick dinner in the JPL cafeteria, and again checked his agents at the door. Hoffman's JPL office was as spare and utilitarian as the one in her home in New York, the major difference being more shelves of memory blocks.
"We tried," she said, handing him a Scotch neat. "Well." She toasted him with a raised Dubonnet on the rocks.
"We did," he said.
"You look tired."
"I am tired."
"Weight of the world on your shoulders," she said, looking at him cautiously.
"Weight of a couple of universes," he said. "I'm discovering how tough a bastard I am, Judith."
"Me too. I talked to the President again this afternoon."
"Oh?"
"Yes. I'm afraid I called him an idiot. I'll very likely be fired or forced to resign by the time you're in orbit."
"Good for you," Lanier said.
"Sit. Talk to me. Tell me what it's like. I want to get up there so badly..." She pulled out chairs and they sat across from each other.
"Why?" Lanier asked. "You've seen the blocks, all the information."
"That's a stupid question."
"It is," Lanier admitted. They were both getting slightly tipsy before the alcohol could possible have had time to take effect. Lanier had noticed the condition before, in times of stress.
"Goddamn, I sure understand what the Russians are worried about," Hoffman said after a moment's silence. "For the last ten years we've been beating the pants off of them in every area diplomatically, technologically. In space and on Earth. Hares to their tortoise. They're dinosaurs and they hate anything faster and more adaptable. Why, young Ivan doesn't know a computer terminal from a tractor wheel. Even the Chinese are beating them."
"The Chinese might edge ahead of us in a generation or two."
"Good. Serve us right." Hoffman said. "Now the Stone comes down, and we intercept it, claim it, let them have little useless nibbles of it in the interests of international cooperation ... And whatever's on the Stone, it might just as well be a tombstone for the Eastern bloc. We'll be in control of unimaginable technology. Jesus. I wish we could sit down with them and reason. but they're too scared, and our President is too damned stupid."
"I don't think stupid is the right word. Shell-shocked, perhaps."
"He knew a little about the Stone when he ran for office."
"He knew it was coming," Lanier said. "None of us knew much more than that."
"Well, fuck him if he can'
t take a joke," Hoffman said, staring at the shutters on the window. "When you were a pilot, way back when," she continued, "you crashed once. Where did you want to be before your plane went down?"
"At the controls," Lanier said without hesitation. "I wanted to save the plane so badly I couldn't even think about punching out. I thought it—the plane—was absolutely beautiful, and I wanted to save it. I also wanted to keep it from killing other people. So we both landed in a lake."
"I'm not nearly so brave," Hoffman said. "I think the Earth is beautiful, and I want to save it. I've been working my buns off to do so. Now all I get is shit. Your airplane didn't thumb its nose at you. It didn't call you on the carpet for your best work, did it?"
Lanier shook his head.
"That's what's happening here. So now I'm saying to myself, 'The hell with 'em.' I want to be up on the Stone when it happens."
"If everything goes to hell on Earth, we're not going to get down from the Stone for years. Not even the lunar settlement will be able to help us."
"Earth will survive?"
"Barely," Lanier said. "A year of sub-zero temperatures throughout the northern hemisphere, plagues and starvation, revolutions. If the libraries reflect our reality, maybe three or four billion people will die overall."
"But it isn't the end of the world."
"No. It may not even happen."
"Do you believe that?"
Lanier kept his silence for a long moment. Hoffman waited, hardly blinking. "No. Not now. Perhaps if the Stone had never arrived."
Hoffman put down her drink and ran her fingers around the rim of the glass. "Well. I'm going to try to get up there. Don't ask how. If I make it, I'll see you on the Stone. If I don't ... You've been good to work with. I'd enjoy working with you more." She reached out and drew him to her, kissing him on the forehead. "Thank you."
A half hour later, after they had drained three drinks apiece, she escorted him to the door. She took a folded piece of paper and pressed it into his hand. "Now take this and use it however you will. You can give it to Gerhardt if you want, or you can destroy it. It's probably not that important now."
"What is it?" he asked.
"The name of the Russian operative on the Stone."
Lanier's hand tightened on the paper, but he did not unfold it.
"The President is moving quicker than I thought he would," Hoffman said. "Sometime tomorrow, you're going to be ordered to close the libraries. He wants to convince the Soviets we're on the up-and-up."
"That's insane," Lanier said.
"Not very. It's politics. He's got big problems. Did I just say that? Yes. I even understand the President now. I must be drunk. Anyway, does it matter?"
"It sure as hell could."
"Then do what you wish. It'll take them a couple of weeks to find out and mount an effort to remove you." She smiled. "As soon as Vasquez does her stuff, you let me know somehow, okay? Not all the cards have been played yet. There are senators and a couple of members of the Joint Chiefs still on my side."
"I'll do that," he said. He took the paper and put it in his pocket.
She opened the door for him. "Good-bye, Garry."
The agent several steps down the hall regarded him with a deadpan expression.
Do I really want to know?
He had to know.
He had to get the Stone ready for whatever would come.
*15*
Heineman piloted the V/STOL alone, using the aircraft's rocket to push the tuberider along the axis from the first
chamber bore hole. It had been only forty minutes since he had linked the tuberider and V/STOL in the south polar bore hole. The "ground" surrounded him on all sides, giving him a peculiar sensation of vertigo at first; which way should he orient? But he adapted quickly.
Using radio beacons set up in each chamber, coordinating through the V/STOL's guidance computers, he could tell his position within a few centimeters. Cautiously and lovingly, he eased the assembly from chamber to chamber, using temporary propulsion packs on the tuberider and the aircraft, coordinated through the aircraft's own customized
guidance system.
Coming up on each bore hole was a thrill that raised the hair on his neck. In the center of the massive gray caps, that tiny hole—wider than a football field, no challenge really, but from a distance almost invisible...
He flew steadily over the fifth chamber's darkly Gothic landscape of clouds, mountains and chasms. Entering the bore hole between the fifth and sixth chambers, he issued a terse instruction to a crew of his engineers waiting near the seventh chamber singularity: "Take 'er down. I'm coming through in a few minutes." They acknowledged and began to
dismantle the top of the research scaffold.
It was Heineman's intention to thread the needle without readjustment, slowly but expertly.
The mated vehicles were monstrous from an aerodynamic viewpoint, and cumbersome from any perspective, but the flight was not difficult. The near-vacuum of the Stone axis offered no resistance.
Even concentrating on the last phase of the delivery, Heineman couldn't stop thinking about flying the aircraft.
Reentry was the uncertain part. Once the tuberider was threaded and steady on the singularity, Heineman would test the clamps by moving thirty-one kilometers down the axis. Descent would be much less complicated so he was told—that far down the corridor; he could descend in almost a straight line instead of the spiral necessary within the rotating chamber.
The V/STOL would unlink and propel itself away from the axis with short bursts from hydrogen peroxide motors. Then it would fall steadily, encountering resistance at the level of the atmosphere field barrier and plasma tube, about twenty-two kilometers above the chamber floor, three kilometers from the axis. Jets and upwellings from coriolis and
compressional heating made the first thin kilometer of air tricky; the V/STOls pilot would have to forget a lot of the truisms learned on Earth.
The designers had estimated the aircraft's fuel use. It could make twenty ascents and descents, and fly approximately four thousand kilometers at cruising speed in the air, before having to tap the tuberider fuel, oxygen and hydrogen peroxide tanks. Fully loaded, the tuberider could refuel the V/STOL five times. And when it was clamped to the singularity, the tuberider could travel indefinitely using the spacial transform effect.
Now, both plane and tuberider were traveling light. Once they were threaded, crews could load them with fuel and oxygen from the staging area of the seventh chamber bore hole.
The sixth chamber rotated around him, a cylindrical cloudscape with broken patches revealing the machines he had only learned about three days before.
He was half-convinced the archaeologists and physicists had conspired to keep him away from the most interesting parts of the Stone out of sheer spite. "No moving parts," Carrolson had said. "We didn't think you'd be interested." He gritted his teeth, then blew out his breath with a whistle. The sixth chamber machinery was overawing. He had
never dreamed he would see anything like it, even on the Stone. It almost took his attention away from piloting the tuberider and V/STOL.
The last bore hole approached rapidly. He slowed the assembly and nudged the craft one last time. Allowing for some mid-hole corrections and drifts caused by irregularities imposed on the Stone by its Earth-Moon orbit, he would be able to slide right onto the singularity, slow the assembly with the clamps and then proceed with the tuberider test.
"There it is," Carrolson said, pointing. She stared through the polarized and filtered binoculars at the plasma tube where it joined the southern cap, then handed the glasses to Farley. Farley squinted through them and clearly saw the mated vehicles, seemingly poised without support; the singularity was impossible to make out from this distance.
"He's going to fly it down today?"
Carrolson nodded. "Heineman will try it out and stay here until Lanier returns."
Rimskaya walked up behind them and stood silent while they p
assed the glasses back and forth. "Ladies," he said some moments later, "we have work to do."
"Certainly," Farley said. Carrolson grinned behind Rimskaya's back. They returned to the tent.