by Algis Budrys
Beloit smiled again, fondly. Even the greatest were as transparent as children, and he clearly loved them for it.
Michaelmas's head cocked and turned as he peered through the windows at the approaching terminal buildings; he felt the reassuring rumble of the wheels on concrete, and his eyes sparkled.
"How much Don't Touch are we going to need?" Domino was saying to him.
"Just enough to twitch a muscle," Michaelmas replied. "On request or on the word 'crowded.' "
" 'Crowded'. Good enough," Domino said. "Are you sure you don't want to go heavier than that?"
Every so often, the idly curious person or the compulsive gadget-tryer wandered over to where the terminal might be lying, and began poking at it. A measured amount of this was all to the good, but it was not something to be encouraged. There were also occasional times when the prying was a little more purposeful, although of course one did not lightly ascribe base motives to one's fellow news practitioners. And conceivably there might be a time when the sternest measures were required.
The terminal operated on six volts DC, but it incor-porated an oscillator circuit that leaked into the metal case when required to do so. It was possible to deliver a harm-less little thrum, followed by Michaelmas's solicitous apology for the slight malfunction. It was also possible to throw someone, convulsive and then comatose, to the floor. In such cases, more profuse reaction from Michaelmas and a soonest-possible battery replacement were required.
"It will do."
"But if you're going to topple Norwood on camera, you'll want the effect to be dramatic. You'll want to make sure the world can readily decide he isn't really one hundred percent sound."
"We are not here to trick the world into an injustice," Michaelmas said, "nor to excessively distress a sincere man. Please do as I say, when said."
"At times you're difficult to understand."
"Well, there's good and bad in that." Michaelmas's gaze had returned to Harry Beloit. He smiled at Harry fondly.
Eleven
Michaelmas and Frontiere stood watching the approach of the umbilical corridor from the gate.
"Is it going well?" Michaelmas asked politely.
Frontiere glanced aside at Norwood, who was chatting casually with some of the UNAC people while Luis worked his camera, and then at Campion, who was close behind Luis's shoulder. "Oh, yes, fine," he said.
Michaelmas smiled faintly. "My sympathies. May I ride to Star Control in the same vehicle with you and Norwood?"
"Certainly. We are all going in an autobus in any case; we are very proud of the latest Mercedes, which incorporates a large number of our accumulator patents. Accordingly, we have a great many of the vehicles here, and use them at every opportunity, including the photographable ones." Frontiere's thinned lips twisted at the corners. "It was my suggestion. I work indefatigably on my client's behalf." He glanced at Campion again. "Perhaps a little too much sometimes."
Michaelmas clapped him on the shoulder. "Be at your ease, Getulio. You are an honest man, and therefore invul-nerable."
"Please do not speak in jest, my friend. There is a faint smell here, and I am trying to convince myself none of it comes from me."
"Ah, well, things often right themselves if a man only has patience." Michaelmas caught Clementine's eye as she stood back beyond Campion and Luis. She had been watching Campion steer Luis's elbow. Michaelmas smiled at her, and she shook her head ruefully at him. He winked, and turned back to Frontiere. "Have you heard from Ossip? How are the verification tests on the sender?"
Frontiere shrugged. "I have not heard. He was only about an hour ahead of us in bringing it here. The laboratory will be proceeding carefully."
Norwood's voice rose a little. He was making planar patterns in the air, his hands flattened, and completing a humorous anecdote from his test-flying days. His eyes spar-kled, and his head was thrown back youthfully. You'd trust your life's savings to him. "Very carefully," Frontiere said at Michaelmas's shoulder, "if they hope to contradict him convincingly."
"Cheer up, Getulio," Michaelmas said. "The workmanship only looks Russian. In fact, it comes from a small Mada-gascan supplier of Ukrainian descent whose total output is pledged to the Laccadive Antiseparist Crusade. Or in fact the false voice transmissions did not come from Kosmgorod. No, by coincidence they emanated from an eight-armed amateur radio hobbyist just arriving from Betelgeuse in its spacetime capsule. It has no interest in this century or the next, and is enroute to setting up as god in pre-Columbian Peru."
"Right," Domino said.
The umbilical arrived at the aircraft hatch and looked on. A cabin attendant pushed open the door. Michaelmas took a deep, surreptitious breath. The little interlude between taxi-ing to the pad and the arrival of the corridor had ended. Frontiere shook his head at Michaelmas. "Come along, Laurent," he said. "I wish I had your North American capacity for humour." They moved into the diffused pale lighting and the cold air.
Waiting for them was the expected thicket of people who really had no business being there, as well as those with credentials or equally plausible excuses. They were being held back behind yielding personnel barriers, and up to now they had stood in more or less good order, rubbing expensively-clad shoulders discreetly, each conscious of dignity and place, each chatting urbanely with the next.
But when the debarking corridor doors opened, they forgot. They became fixated on the slim man with the boy face, and there was nothing tailoring or other forms of sophistication could do about that.
Norwood. It was, indeed, Norwood. Ah.
They moved forward, and where the barriers stopped them, they unhooked them automatically, without looking, staring straight ahead.
"On your diagonal right," Domino said, and Michaelmas broke off staring at the welcomers and looked. A tall, cadaverous young man in an Alexandria-tailored yellow suit was coming through the second of the automatic clamshell doors into the area. His large, round brown eyes were sparkling. He strode boldly, and he had his thumbs hooked into the slash pockets of his weskit.
"Cikoumas."
"Bust him," Michaelmas said.
The doors nipped the hurrying young man's heel. He cried out and pitched forward, arms flailing. His attempt to get at least one elbow down did not succeed; his nose struck heavily into the stiff pile of the carpeting. He struggled face-down, cursing, one foot held high between the doors, but only a security guard moved towards him with offers of assistance and promises of infirmary. He was, after all, at the back of the crowd.
Brisk in the air-conditioning, jockeying for position, the aircraft passengers proceeded to the gate, where cameras, microphones and dignitaries did their work, but not as smoothly as the UNAC press people, who lubricated the group through its passage toward the ground-vehicle dock. Camera crews eddied around the main knot of movement. "The dignified gentleman with the rimless glasses is Mr Raschid Samir, your director," Domino said. Mr Samir was directing general shots of Michaelmas debarking with Norwood and Frontiere. He had an economy of movement and a massive imperturbability which forced others to work around him as if he were a rock in the rapids. "He will follow you to Star Control with the crew truck and await instructions."
Michaelmas nodded. "Right. Good." As they moved out of the terminal building proper, he was concentrating on his position in the crowd while plotting all the vectors on Norwood. Two crews at the nearer end of the dock were covering most of one side of the astronaut as he strode along, grinning and still shaking hands with some of the local UNAC people. Frontiere was staying close to him, thus blanketing most of his right flank. Other camera positions or live observers were covering the other approach angles almost continuously. Michaelmas stepped sideward in rela-tion to a group of press aides moving along beside Campion and Clementine. While they masked him from forward view, he shifted the strap of the terminal from his left shoulder into his hand, and then stepped behind a dock-side pillar. The bus was there, snugged into its bay, white and black, the roof chitinous with
accumulators, the win-dows polarized, the doors folding open now while the party rippled to a halt. Norwood half turned, directly in front of Michaelmas, almost in the doorway, tossing a joke back over his shoulder, one hand on an upright metal stanchion, as the group narrowed itself down to file in. Michaelmas was chatting with a press aide. "We're crowded here, aren't we?" he remarked, and laid a corner of the dangling terminal up against Norwood's calf muscle just below the back of the knee, so gently, so surely, so undetectably that he half expected to hear the pang of a harmonic note. But instead Norwood sagged just a little on that side before his hand suddenly gripped the stanchion whitely, and his toe kicked the step riser.
His eyes widened at betrayal. He moved on, and in, and sat down quickly in the nearest of the individual swivelling armchairs. As the bus filled and dosed, and then rolled out through the insulated gates, Michaelmas could see him chatting and grinning but flexing the calf again and again, as if it were a sweet wife who'd once kissed a stranger. I could have done worse by you, Michaelmas thought, but it was nevertheless unpleasant to watch the trouser fabric twitching.
The bus rolled smoothly along the ramps among the towers, aiming for the hills and then Star Control. "Would you like to speak to Norwood now?" Frontiere asked, leaning across the aisle.
"We will arrive at quarter to three, so there is half an hour."
Michaelmas shook his head. "No, thank you, Getulio," he smiled, making himself look a little wan. "I think I'll rest a bit. It's been a long day. I'll catch him later."
"You look tired," Frontiere agreed, annoyingly.
Michaelmas cocked an eyebrow. "Let Campion continue to interview him. There must be one or two things he would still like to know."
Frontiere winced. "Listen," he said softly, "you say Camp-ion has a good reputation?"
"I say, and so do others whose judgement I respect. He has a fine record for aggressive newsgathering."
Frontiere nodded to himself, faintly, wryly, and grunted. "Somehow, that's small comfort."
"It's the best I can do," Michaelmas said. Down the aisle, Clementine had turned her seat to form a conversational group with Luis and Campion. Campion was talking in-tently. Clementine was responding and gesturing, her hands held forward and curved inward to describe shots, in the manner that made all directors resemble Atlas searching for a place to rest his burden. Luis sat back, his arms folded across his chest. Michaelmas reclined lower in his seat. "I would like to see Papashvilly as soon as possible after we reach Control. My crew chief is Mr Raschid Samir, and he'll be arriving by truck at the same time."
"Yes, that's arranged. Pavel is waiting for you. He says to meanwhile tell you the story about the aardvark and Marie Antoinette."
"It's the same story about the aardvark and Isadora Duncan, except that the Isadora Duncan version is better, since she is wearing a long scarf at the time."
"Ah."
"And could you let me know if you hear from Ossip about the sender?"
"On the instant."
"Grazie." Michaelmas settled his head deeper between the sound-absorbent wings of his chair and closed his eyes.
Domino said: "The joke about the aardvark and Isadora Duncan is the same as the joke about the aardvark and Annie Oakley, except that Annie is firing a Sharps repeating carbine."
"Granted," Michaelmas said absently. He was comfortable and relaxed, and remembering Pavel Papashvilly in the back room of a chophouse around the corner from Cavanaugh's down on lower Eighth Avenue, after a recording at Lincoln Center.
"Cosmonautics and culture," Papashvilly was saying, lean-ing back on a fauteuil with his arm lightly across the shoulders of a member of the corps de ballet, "how allied!" The footage had been of Papashvilly at Coppelia, first walking at night like a demon of the steppes among the floodlit fountains of the plaza, afraid of nothing, a meter and a half in height, eyes flickering with reflections, grin-ning. The pause at the great glass doors, the head tilted up-ward, and the photosensitive mechanism swinging them apart without further human intervention. Now the click of heels on marble gave way to orchestrated music, and the opening credits and title came up.
Then at the perfor-mance he had smiled and oohed and aahed, hands elevated and tracing patterns in the air, and he had stood and applauded and shouted. Now he passed a palm delicately along wispy fabric at the dancer's pale shoulder. "What thin partitions," he murmured, winking at Michaelmas. He laughed, the dancer gave him a knowing sidelong look, and they all three had a little more steak and lobster and some more Rhine wine. "That will be a good thing, this visit. I know you American people are disappointed about Walter." He paused and took a sip, his lips pressed hard against the rim of the glass, his eyes looking off into a dimmer corner of the little room. "It was a stupid, need-less thing, whatever happened. We are not after all any longer doing things for the first or second time, correct ? But it is now for an understanding to be made that he and I and all the others, we are for all the people." He put the glass down and considered.
"And we are from all the people," he had added, and Michaelmas had smiled a little crookedly.
When he had seen the dancer's hand on Pavel's thigh he had excused himself and gone home.
The UNAC bus passed from the last tangle of feeder ramps and entered the straightline highway into the hills. There was no speed limit on this road; the passenger chairs moved a little on their gymbals as the acceleration built. A nearly inaudible singing occurred in Michaelmas's ear; something in the system somewhere was cycling very near the frequency he and Domino used between him and the terminal. A mechanic had failed to lock some service hatch. Noise leaked out of the propulsion bay. Michaelmas grimaced and ground his teeth lightly.
Coarse, scoured, and ivory-coloured in the sun beyond the windows, the foothills rose under the toned blue of the sky.
Norwood had stopped fussing with his leg. But he had also stopped being so animated, and was sitting with one corner of his lip pulled into his teeth, thoughtfully.
There had been a time a little later in the US tour, at a sports-car track in the gravel hills of eastern Long Island. Rudi Cherpenko had been conducting some tyre tests, and offered Papashvilly a ride if he had time. UNAC had thought it a fine idea, if Michaelmas or someone of that stature would cover it. Pavel had taken once around the track to learn how to drift and how to steer with the accelerator, and half around to learn how to brake and to deduce good braking points, and by then his adrenalin was well up. He went around five times more; he could be seen laughing and shouting in the cockpit as he drilled past the little cluster of support vehicles. When he was finally flagged off, he came in flushed and large-eyed, trembling. "Oy ah!" he had shouted, vaulting out of the cockpit. "Jesus Maria, what a thing this is to do!" He jumped at Cherpenko.
They guffawed and embraced, slamming their hands down between each other's shoulderblades with the car's engine pinging and contracting beside them as it cooled. Yet Michaelmas had caught the onset of sobriety in Papashvilly's eyes. He was laughing and shaking his head, but when he saw that Michaelmas was seeing the change in him, he returned a little flicker of a rueful smile.
Late that night in the rough-timbered bar of the Inn, with Cherpenko asleep in his room because of the early schedule, and the crew people off raising hell on Shelter Island, Papashvilly had sat staring out the window, beyond the reflection of their table candle, and beyond the silhou-ette of docked cabin boats. Michaelmas had listened.
"It is an intoxication," Papashvilly had begun. As he went on, his voice quickened whenever he pictured the things he talked about, slowed and lowered when he explained what they meant. "It takes hold."
Michaelmas smiled. "And you are back in the days of George the Resplendent?"
Papashvilly turned his glance momentarily sideward at Michaelmas, He laughed softly. "Ah, George Lasha of the Bagratid Empire. Yes, a famous figure. No, I think perhaps I go back farther than eight hundred years. You call me Georgian. In the Muscovite language, I am presumed a Gruzi
an. Certain careless speakers from my geographic area yet refer to Sakartvelo, the united kingdom. Well, some of us are very ambitious. And I cannot deny that in my blood there is perhaps some trace of the great Kartlos, and that I am of the eastern kingdom, that is, a Kartvelian."
He was drinking gin, as an experiment. He raised his glass, wrinkled his nose, swallowed and smiled at the win-dow. "There have been certain intrusions on the blood since even long before the person you call Alexander the Great came with his soldiers to see if it was true about the golden fleece, when Sakartvelo was the land of Colchis. I am per-haps a little Mingrelian, a little Kakhetian, a little Javak-hete, a little Mongol . . ." He put his hand out flat, thumb and palm down, and trembled it slightly. "A little of this and that." He closed his fist. "But my mother told me on her knee that I am an Ossete of the high grassy pastures, and we were there before anyone spoke or wrote of any other people in those highlands. We have never relinquished them. No, not to the Turks, not to Timur the Lame and his elephants, nor to the six-legged Mongols. It was different, of course, in the lowlands, though those are stout men." He nodded to himself. "Stout men. But they had empires and relinquished them."
He put down his glass again and held it as if to keep it from rising, while he looked at it inattentively. "To the south of us is a flood of stone - the mountain, Ararat, and the Elburz, and Iran, and Karakorum, and Himalaya. To the north of us is the grass that rolls from the eastern world and breaks against the Urals. To the east and west of us are seas like walls; it is the grass and stone that toss us on their surf. Hard men from the north seek Anatolia and the fat sultan-ates. Hard men from the south seek the Khirgiz pasturage and the back door to Europe.