But first things had to come first. It was time to begin mobilizing the potential allies he had been quietly sounding out and cultivating for the three years since the last elections. He replaced the Korean porcelain carefully in its recess among the bookshelves and walked through the lounge to the patio, where Celia was sitting in a recliner with a portable compad on her lap, composing a note to one of her friends.
The young, sophisticated wife that Howard Kalens had taken with him to Luna to join the Mayflower II was now in her early forties, but her face had acquired character and maturity along with the womanly look that had evolved from girlish prettiness, and her body had filled out to a voluptuousness that had lost none of its femininity. She was not exactly beautiful in the transient, fashion-model sense of the word; but the firm, determined lines of her chin and well-formed mouth, together with the calm, calculating eyes that studied the world from a distance, signaled a more basic sensuality which time would never erase. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing tan slacks with an orange silk blouse covering firm, full breasts.
She looked up as Howard came out of the house. Her expression did not change. Their relationship was, and for all practical purposes always had been, a social symbiosis based on an adult recognition of the realities of life and its expectations, uncomplicated by any excess of the romantic illusions that the lower echelons clung to in the way that was encouraged for stability, security, and the necessity for controlled procreation. Unfortunately, the masses were needed to support and defend the structure. Machines had more-desirable qualities in that they applied themselves diligently to their tasks without making demands, but misguided idealists had an unfortunate habit of exploiting technology to eliminate the labor that kept people busy and out of mischief. Too, the idealists would teach them how to think. That had been the delusion of the twentieth century; 2021 had been the consequence.
“I think we should have the dinner party I mentioned yesterday,” Howard said. “Can you put together an invitation list and send it out? The end of next week might be suitable—say Friday or Saturday.”
“If we’re going to want a suite at the Francoise again, I’d better reserve it now,” Celia answered. “Any idea how many people we’re talking about?”
“Oh, not a lot, I want it to be cozy and private. Here should be fine. Probably about a dozen. There’s Lewis, of course, and Gerrard. And it’s about time we started bringing Borftein closer into the family.”
“That man!”
“Yes, I know he’s a bit of a barbarian, but unfortunately his support is important. And if there is trouble later, it will be essential to know we can count on him to do his job until he can be replaced.” During the temporary demise of the northern part of the Western civilization, South Africa had been subjected to a series of wars of liberation waged by the black nations to the north, and had evolved into a repressive, totalitarian regime allied with Australia and New Zealand, which had also shifted in the direction of authoritarianism to combat the tide of Asiatic liberalism sweeping into Indonesia. Their methods had merit, but produced Borfteins as a by-product.
“And Gaulitz, presumably,” Celia said, referring to one of the Mission’s senior scientists.
“Oh, yes, Gaulitz definitely. I’ve plans for Herr Gaulitz.”
“A government job?”
“A witch doctor.” Kalens smiled at the frown on Celia’s face. “One of the reasons America declined was that it allowed science to become too popular and too familiar, and therefore an object of contempt. Science is too potent to be entrusted to the masses. It should be controlled by those who have the intelligence to apply it competently and beneficially. Gaulitz would be a suitable figure to groom as a . . . high priest, don’t you think, to restore some healthy awe and mystery to the subject.” He nodded knowingly. “The Ancient Egyptians had the right idea.” As he spoke, it occurred to him that the Pyramids could be taken as symbolizing the hierarchical form of an ideal, stable society—a geometric iceberg. The analogy was an interesting one. It would make a good point to bring up at the dinner party. Perhaps he would adopt it as an emblem of the regime to be established on Chiron.
“Have you made your mind up about Sterm?” Celia asked.
Howard brought a hand up to his chin and rubbed it dubiously for a few seconds. “Mmm . . . Sterm. I can’t make him out. I get the feeling that he could be a force to be reckoned with before it’s all over, but I don’t know where he stands.” He thought for a moment longer and at last shook his head. “There are some confidential matters that I’ll want to bring up. Sterm could turn out to be an adversary. It wouldn’t be wise to show too much of our hand this early on. You’d better leave him out of it. Later on it might change . . . but let’s keep him at a distance for the time being.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Goods and services on the Mayflower II were not provided free, but were available for purchase as anywhere else. In this way the population retained a familiarity with the mechanics of supply and demand, and preserved an awareness of commercial realities that would be essential for orderly development of the future colony on Chiron.
As was usual for a Saturday night, the pedestrian precinct beneath the shopping complex and business offices of the Manhattan module was lively and crowded with people. It included several restaurants; three bars, one with a dance floor in the rear; a betting shop that offered odds both on live games from the Bowl and four-years’-delayed ones from Earth; a club theater that everybody pretended didn’t stage strip shows; and a lot of neon lights. The Bowery bar, a popular haunt of off-duty regular troops, was squeezed into one corner of the precinct next to a coffee shop, behind a studded door of imitation oak and a high window of small, tinted glass panes that turned the inside lights red.
The scene inside the Bowery was busy and smoky, with a lot of uniforms and women visible among the crowd lining the long bar on the left side of the large room inside the door, and a four-piece combo playing around the corner in the smaller room at the back. Colman and some of D Company were sitting at one of the tables standing in a double row along the wall opposite the bar. Sirocco had joined them despite the regulation against officers’ fraternizing with enlisted men, and Corporal Swyley was up and about again after the dietitian at the Brigade sick bay had enforced a standing order to put Swyley on spinach and fish whenever he was admitted. Bret Hanlon, the sergeant in charge of Second Platoon and a long-standing buddy of Colman, was sitting on the other side of Sirocco with Stanislau, Third Platoon’s laser gunner, and a couple of civilian girls; a signals specialist called Anita, attached to Brigade H.Q. was snuggling close to Colman with her arm draped loosely through his.
Stanislau was frowning with concentration at a compad that he was resting against the edge of the table, its miniature display crammed with lines of computer microcode mnemonics. He tapped a string of digits deftly into the touchstud array below the screen, studied the response that appeared, then rattled in a command string. A number appeared low down in a corner. Stanislau looked up triumphantly at Sirocco. “3.141592653,” he announced. “It’s pi to ten places.” Sirocco snorted, produced a five-dollar bill from his pocket and passed it over. The bet had been that Stanislau could crash the databank security system and retrieve an item that Sirocco had stored half an hour previously in the public sector under a personal access key.
“How about that?” Hanlon shouted delightedly. “The guy did it!”
“Don’t forget—a round of beers too,” Colman reminded Sirocco. The girls whooped their approval.
“Where did you learn that, Stan?” Paula, one of the civilian girls, asked. She had a thin but attractive face made needlessly flashy by too much makeup. Her clothes were tight and provocative.
Stanislau slipped the compad into his pocket. “You don’t wanna know about that,” he said. “It’s not very respectable.”
“Come on, Stan. Give,” Terry, Paula’s companion, insisted. Colman gave Stanislau
a challenging look that left him no way out.
Stanislau took a long draught from his glass and made a what-the-hell? gesture. “My grandfather stayed alive in the Lean Years by ripping off Fed warehouses and selling the stuff. He could bomb any security routine ever dreamed up. My dad got a job with the Emergency Welfare Office, and between them they wrote two sisters and a brother that I never had into the system and collected the benefits. So life wasn’t too bad.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “I guess it got to be kind of a tradition . . . sort of handed down in the family.”
“A real pro burglar!” Terry exclaimed.
“You son-of-a-gun.” Hanlon said admiringly.
“Son-of-a-something, anyway,” Anita added. They all laughed.
Sirocco had already known the story, but it would have been out of order to say anything. Stanislau’s transfer to D Company had followed an investigation of the mysterious disappearance from Brigade stores of tools and electrical spares that had subsequently appeared on sale in the Home Entertainment department of one of the shopping marts.
Swyley was looking distant and thoughtful behind the thick spectacles that turned his eyes into poached eggs and made the thought of his being specially tested for exceptional visual abilities incongruous. He was wondering how useful Stanislau’s nefarious skills might be for inserting a few plus-points into his own record in the Military’s administrative computer, but couldn’t really say anything about the idea in Sirocco’s presence. There was such a thing as being too presumptuous. He would talk to Stanislau privately, he decided.
“Where’s Tony Driscoll tonight?” Paula asked, straightening up in her chair to scan the bar. “I don’t see him around anywhere.”
“Don’t bother looking,” Colman said. “He’s got the late duty.”
“Don’t you ever give these guys a break?” Terry asked Sirocco.
“Somebody has to run the Army. It’s just his turn. He’s as qualified to do it as anyone else.”
“Well what do you know—I’m on the loose tonight,” Paula said, giving Hanlon a cozy look.
Bret Hanlon held up a hand protectively. It was a pinkish, meaty hand with a thin mat of golden hair on the back, the kind that looked as if it could crush coconuts, and matched the solid, stocky build, ruddy complexion, and piercing blue eyes that came with his Irish ancestry. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m contracted now, all nice and respectable. That’s the fella you should be making eyes at.” He nodded toward Colman and grinned mischievously.
“Do him good too,” Sirocco declared. “Then they might make him an engineer. But you’ll have a hard time. He’s holding out till he’s found out what the talent’s like on Chiron.”
“I didn’t know you had a thing about little girls, Steve,” Anita teased. “You don’t look the type.” Hanlon roared and slapped his thigh.
“I’ve got two sisters you can’t get in trouble with,” Stanislau offered.
“You got it wrong,”‘ Colman told them. “It’s not the little ones at all.” He widened his eyes in a parody of lewd anticipation and grinned. “Think of all those grandmothers.” Terry and Paula laughed.
Although Colman was going along with the mood and making a joke out of it, inside he felt a twinge of irritation. He wasn’t sure why. Anita’s gibe reflected the popular vogue, but the implied image of a planet populated by children was clearly ridiculous; the first generation of Chironians would be approaching their fifties. He didn’t like foolish words going into people’s heads and coming out again without any thought about their meaning having transpired in between. Anita was an attractive girl, and not stupid. She didn’t have to do things like that. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he was being too solemn. Hadn’t he just done the same thing?
“Some grandmothers!” Terry exclaimed. “Did anybody see the news today? Some scientist or other thinks the Chironians could be building bombs. There was an interview with Kalens too. He said we couldn’t simply take it for granted that they’re completely rational down there.”
“You’re not suggesting there’ll be a fight, are you?” Paula said.
“I didn’t say that. But they’re funny people . . . cagey. They’re not exactly giving straight answers about everything.”
“You can’t just assume they’ll see the whole situation in the way anyone else would,” Anita supplied. “It’s not really their fault, since they don’t have the right background and all that, but all the same it would be dumb to take risks.”
“It makes sense, I guess,” Paula agreed absently.
“Do you figure they might start trouble, chief?” Stanislau asked, turning his head toward Sirocco.
Sirocco shrugged noncommittally. “Can’t say. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. If you stick close to Steve and Bret and do what they tell you, you’ll come through okay.” Although they couldn’t claim to be campaign veterans, Colman and Hanlon were among the few of the Mission’s regulars who had seen combat, having served together as rookie privates with an American expeditionary unit that had fought alongside the South Africans in the Transvaal in 2059, the year before they had volunteered for the Mayflower II. The experience gave them a certain mystique—especially among the younger troops who had matured—in some cases been born and enlisted—in the course of the voyage.
“I think it will be all right if Kalens gets elected,” Terry told them. “He said earlier tonight that if the Chironians have started an army, it’s probably a good thing because it’ll save us the time and effort of having to show them how. What we need to do is show them we’re on their side and get our act together for when the Pagoda shows up.” The EAF starship was designed differently from the Mayflower II. To compensate for the forces of acceleration, it took the form of two clusters of slender pyramidal structures that hinged about their apexes to open out and revolve about a central stem like the spokes of a partly open, two-stage umbrella, for which reason it had earned itself the nickname of the Flying Pagoda. Terry sipped her drink and looked around the table. “The guy’s got it figured realistically. You see, there’s no need for a fight. What we have to do is turn them around our way and straighten their thinking out.”
“But that doesn’t mean we have to take chances,” Anita pointed out.
“Oh, sure . . . I’m just saying there doesn’t have to be anything to get scared about.”
Colman was becoming irritated again. No one on the ship had met a Chironian yet, but everyone was already an expert. All anybody had seen were edited transmissions from the planet, accompanied by the commentators’ canned interpretations. Why couldn’t people realize when they were being told what to think? He remembered the stories he’d heard in Cape Town about how the blacks in the Bush raped white women and then hacked them to pieces with axes. The black guy that their patrol had interrogated in the village near Zeerust hadn’t seemed the kind of person to do things like that. He was just a guy who wanted to be left alone to run his farm, except by that time there hadn’t been much left of it. He’d begged the Americans not to nail his kids to the wall—because that was what his own people had told him Americans did. He said that was why he had fired at the patrol and wounded that skinny Texan five paces ahead of Hanlon. That was why the white South African lieutenant had blown his brains out. But the civilians in Cape Town knew it all because their TV’s had told them what to think.
Corporal Swyley wasn’t saying anything, which was significant because Swyley was usually a pretty good judge of what was what. His silence meant that he didn’t agree with what was being said. When Swyley agreed with something, he said he didn’t agree. When he really didn’t agree, he said nothing. He never said he agreed with anything. When he had decided that he felt fine after the dietitian discovered the standing order for spinach and fish, the Medical Officer hadn’t been able to accuse him of faking anything because Swyley had never agreed with anybody that he was sick; all he’d said was that he had stomach cramps. The M.O. had diagnosed that anybody with stomach cramps
on his own time had to be sick. Swyley hadn’t. In fact, Swyley had disagreed, which should have been obvious because he hadn’t said anything.
“Well, I think there’s something to be scared about,” Paula said. “Suppose they turn out to be really mean and don’t want to mess around with talking at all. Suppose they send a missile up at us without any warning or anything . . . I mean, we’d be stuck out in space like a sitting duck, wouldn’t we. Then where would we be?”
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