by Bob Mauldin
Jim Junior spoke first. “Robert gave us that list, Dad. He says that the names on it are their people. The clippings show that somebody is rounding up the families of the people on that list. We think you should help the people who haven’t been picked up yet to get away. Maybe to Canada or something,” he finished lamely.
Robert and Michiko had wrought better than they knew. They had known, of course, that the elder Collier had been a peace-activist himself during the Viet Nam War, but they, along with his own son, hadn’t known the older man’s complete past. The fact was that he was the perfect man for such a situation. He had helped set up and operate more than one underground network, funneling people out of the country so they wouldn’t have to fight in a war they had no belief in. Now, he was going to do it again, this time on his belief in the integrity of a mere boy (hadn’t he been about that age when he went to his first sit-in and spent the night in jail for it?) who just happened to be one of the two best friends his son ever had. Dave had joined the two in high school, but Jim and Robert had been friends ever since grade school.
That expertise, so hard-won in the sixties, would be called on again, to save more people from the depredations of a rampaging government. “I need to make some calls, boys, but I’m sure I can get something set up. After all these years, there are going to be some holes in the old network, but I’ll bet we can get those filled pretty quick.” Changing the subject, he asked, “Are you two sure Robert is on the level about all this?” He glanced at the television, now detailing the highlights of a local collegiate sporting event as if nothing were wrong with the world as it spun in its orbit.
“Dad, we’ve been on the ship. Robert and ‘Chiko took the four of us for tours. We met the Captain and some of the officers and a few of the crew, too. There're hundreds, thousands, of them out there, now. You saw the video. Watch it again and tell me you don’t believe me.”
Dave felt he had to make his contribution to the conversation. “Mr. Collier, there’s more than that. There’s nine hundred on the big ship alone. They have two bases, are building a third, with a fourth in mind, and two ships already constructed. I’d guess we’ve got well over two thousand people actually in space. Then there’s a few like us who recruit on the sly, so to speak.” The last thing before the announcers signed off was their standard hook: “Stay tuned to this station for breaking news on the mysterious abductions as we get it!”
Fifteen minutes later, James the Elder was on the phone to one of his friends, ever-mindful of the new technology capable of recording his call. “Echelon is up and running, Sam. So all I’m going to say is that we need to get some of the old crowd together at my place for a talk. This is like the most serious shit to come down since Nam, man.” His attention was diverted by a banner running across the top of the muted TV screen. Grabbing the remote, he said, “Turn your set up! We may have more going on. I’m going to try to set my old VCR.” He set the phone down and fiddled with the machine under the TV for a moment, missing a fraction of the story.
“This reporter has received reliable information that this,” she turned to look over her shoulder and the wind howled through her microphone, “is the destination for literally thousands of American citizens who have the misfortune to be related to people the government has decided are threats to its existence. This reporter is reminded, although I wasn’t even born then, of the roundup of American citizens just seventy years ago because they had the misfortune to be of Japanese or German ancestry.”
The aging hippie picked the phone back up and asked, “Are you listening to this? As soon as it’s over, get over here and bring everybody still able to get around without a walker, will ya? I’ve got more calls to make.”
The message time for something to get to Earth from the asteroid belt is on the order of thirteen minutes, one way. Then there is the time spent waiting until an unsuspecting recipient realizes his friend from outer space has left a message on the interplanetary answering machine. Robert didn’t expect an immediate reply and wasn’t disappointed. It was almost ten hours before a runner from Communications arrived with a response. Robert thanked him and closed the door. Calling Michiko over, he slid the miniature video disk into the player. “Got your message. Will try to see what we can find out. We’ll need a few days to look into it. We’ll call you back as soon as we know something,” was the gist of the message.
Rumors ran through Galileo like wildfire. The radio operator Robert used to send his message to Earth started the “Guess what I heard?” game before his shift was up. Within eight hours the story was larger than life, with the governments of Earth planning to strike against the Alliance and use the hostages for a shield. Work slowed to a standstill while every breath was held, waiting on a response from Earth, and the source was the same as the one that had started the trouble in the first place.
Four days passed while the rhetoric grew hotter and steamier on both sides of the issue. Someone was always glued to the television receiver, keeping track of the developing situation on Earth. National security versus civil rights was the topic on every show that boasted a discussion format, and not a few of those that didn’t, usually. Experts bandied words and while the words were sharp, the underlying tone was still a bit incredulous. “That our own country would treat its own citizens this way was so ...”
Entirely believable. The short shrift the Japanese-Americans and German-Americans got was brought out first, opening old wounds, and the Blacks and American-Indians jumped on the bandwagon underlining the predominately white, callous, imperialism the United States had fallen heir to early on in its existence. A government, any government, is a living, breathing entity. It has the same basic instinct that single individuals have: the drive to survive. It will do whatever it has to do to achieve that goal. It will walk over the lives and dignity of “inferior” races to insure its growth. It will walk away with the lands of still others in an attempt to achieve a manifest destiny it possibly shouldn’t have envisioned. It later took and isolated the possible infection of Japanese and Germans, appropriating their properties in the process, to insure its own survival. Why not believe this newest revelation?
Ultimately, it was Simon’s mystique as The Captain, and Kitty’s as the unflappable Captain Kitty, though she would be shocked to know that she had a mystique, that averted what could have been the Terran Alliance’s first mutiny. “We can’t get there in time, anyway,” he pointed out. “Our people are already under military control.”
Kitty stood on a podium next to Simon on the Galileo’s Projects Deck while Heinlein rode beside Galileo. Word of the raids reached Heinlein through the daily message relays, and Marsha rendezvoused with Simon as soon as she heard. She looked out over the crowd of anxious faces. “What’s done is done,” Kitty said. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but there is nothing we can do right now. From the messages we are getting from our people on Earth, not all of us have been identified, so not all of our families have been targeted. Both Simon and I have relatives in custody, so do several of the other officers. Mostly those who chose to reveal themselves at various times during our last visits to Earth. I think that the best thing is to wait and see what happens. The news has broken, now. You can bet that every effort is being made to find out who those people are and get them released. Especially if they haven’t done anything. And most especially if most of them are good, upstanding, Americans, as they are going to be portrayed by every civil rights group looking for a platform to hang their name on. Those folks will do our job for us, and if they can’t, well Simon has already said it. We hold the high ground and have the technological advantage.”
“This is Sarah Parker, reporting for Channel Four News. In just a moment you will see the second U.S. military cargo plane to land within the last hour here at Denver International Airport. The first was laden with people being returned to their homes by the very agencies that were responsible for their illegal detainment in the first place. Planes just like this o
ne are carrying people home from secret locations all over the U.S., like the one I reported on in North Dakota.” An Army-green plane bisected the camera shot, confirming the reporter’s story. “The previous group declined to speak on camera, but we are hopeful that someone on this flight will be willing to talk with us about their ordeal at the hands of the very government their tax-dollars help to perpetuate.”
Obviously trying to fill time, Parker said to the announcer on the other end of the camera, “I do believe that if there hadn’t been such a mix of people picked up, there wouldn’t have been as much fuss raised. By my best estimates, there were no less than four police officers, two city councilmen, a Baptist and a Lutheran minister, and a state representative caught in the largest sweep since the McCarthy era. We have been told that blame is being laid at the feet of over-zealous agents of an undisclosed government agency and an internal investigation is underway.”
Her expression, studiously neutral until that moment cracked and a look of disdain passed across her face. “Democrats and Republicans alike are calling for an investigation into this latest abuse of power being laid at the White House’s front door. Spokesman Dan Goodall has stated that President Drake had no knowledge of the operation and was as stunned as the rest of the world by the revelation.
“The exposure of this atrocity has spurred Congress and the House to pass a unanimous resolution in record time. Co-authored by leaders from both parties, the resolution condemns the detention of American citizens without due process in the harshest terms without specifically naming individuals.”
“Now that one’s a little fireball,” Simon said appreciatively as he watched a replay of that particular story. “I’m willing to bet that it was her first broadcast a few days ago that got the ball rolling on getting our people out of jail. I think we should thank her personally, don’t you, Hon?”
Kitty stared at the screen for a few seconds before she said quietly, “That woman stuck her neck pretty far out. Someone’s really not going to appreciate his apple-cart being overturned like that. I hope she’s got eyes in the back of her head, because she’s going to need ‘em. And thank her? Sure. Why don’t we give her an interview when we get home?”
It looked like the U.S. was going to have to admit that it had been treating with the Alliance, but no such confirmation was forthcoming. “What about the video of the young man beaming out,” one reporter shouted at the Presidential press secretary.
“I told you,” Dan Goodall said, “that I won’t take any more questions on that subject. We’re dealing with special effects, nothing more. I suspect that the young man in that video had some accomplices in the matter.” He didn’t directly implicate the reporter, but the crowd knew what he meant. The news conference being composed entirely of reporters, his comment wasn’t taken too well, and a sullen murmur began to make itself heard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The months that followed saw the completion of Libra Base and the investiture of Victor McCord as its Commander. Those final two months also saw a lot of radio traffic between Simon and Kitty and the Brandt’s and Collier’s on Earth. It seemed that all of the detainees, as the hundreds were being called by the media, had been released as promised by an embarrassed administration. The problem was that neither Simon’s parents nor Kitty’s relatives, two aging aunts in Montana, along with several dozen others from top-ranking Alliance officers, were answering the calls being placed to them by people in the Brandt/Collier network.
Discarding the idea that all families would coincidentally choose the same time to go on vacation, Simon and Kitty suspected the worst. Calling in the affected officers, they wanted to keep the information from general knowledge until after Libra was turned over to Victor.
Simon privately vowed to show the Drake administration the folly of its ways. “I don’t like the thought of them using our families this way,” Simon declared to Kitty. Never really on the closest terms with his father, Simon still felt the anger boil up whenever he thought of it. Family is, after all, family. “Dirty pool, and I won’t stand for it any longer than I have to. When we get back, we warn ‘em first, then we drop a rock in the ocean to prove we can do it. If our people are still not set free, we start dropping progressively bigger rocks. We can use the Parker woman to spread the word as soon as we get home. Just get Collier or Brandt to get in touch with her and set things up.”
Orphan Kitty might be, but she did have relatives in Miles City. They had never been truly close, but as Simon said, they were family. Besides, there was a principle at stake here.
The last two months before Libra was able to breathe on her own were the toughest on Simon and Kitty. They tried several times through the radio link with Earth to call their respective families, interspersing their own message traffic with that of the others concerned about their own families as well. Surreptitious inquiries revealed that their families were among the few still unaccounted for, of those who chose to admit to families at all.
The two talked together late into the night every night, growing more despondent as each message returned marked, “No response.” Curled into a small ball and sheltered in Simon’s arms, Kitty asked quietly, “What are we going to do?”
“This is somebody’s way of telling us that they know who we are,” Simon stated firmly. “They can’t speak to us directly, but I’ll bet that they think they got their message across.”
Kitty looked up questioningly. “And the message is?”
“Give up or you families get it, basically,” Simon said. “But I’m not going to let that happen.”
Kitty pushed herself away from Simon’s side and stared at him. “What have you got up your sleeve?”
“Look,” Simon said, standing up, “attention was what got the rest of the hostages released, and it’ll do it again. I sent a message to Collier asking him to get in touch with that reporter, Sarah Parker. I figured she would love to get an exclusive, but Jim sent word back today that she has dropped out of sight. Nobody at the TV station knew anything about it. Even her cameraman, a guy named Dwayne, was missing. Some cameras were still checked out to him, and everyone thought the two had taken off after another story.”
“And?” Kitty prompted, after a long silence.
“Collier thinks he was followed after he left the station. Pretty sure of it, in fact. He thinks he lost whoever it was in a shopping center.”
“So what are we going to do?” Kitty repeated.
“Nothing,” Simon stated flatly. “Nothing is going to happen to our folks until they know that we know they have them.”
“Wait a minute!” Kitty protested. “That kind of logic gives me a headache.”
“The people being threatened,” Simon said simply, “that’s you and me, have to know that there is a threat. Without that knowledge, there is nothing to make us change our course of action. Once they know that we know, they can begin to apply pressure.”
“So, as long as we don’t respond, nothing happens?” Kitty asked, unbelieving.
“That’s about the size of it,” Simon said. “Our folks get away from the hassle of everyday life for a while and have a story to tell forever. There was some other reporter got another story aired about one of our guys, Grant, I think his name was. I want to use that reporter as a backup in case something has happened to Parker.”
“But this is our secret for now?” Kitty asked.
“Right,” Simon agreed. “For now.”
The week before Galileo was due to leave for Earth, Simon called a council of war. Kitty was present as were Gayle and Stephen. Also present were Victor McCord, in his capacity as Base Commander, Marsha Kane, de facto Captain of Heinlein, and Captain Lucy Grimes, just arrived from her trials in the newly named Anne McCaffrey.
“Isn’t it a little harsh to call this a council of war, Simon?” Marsha looked a bit edgy at the thought.
“No, it isn’t,” Simon responded. “First, if you will excuse the informali
ty, here are your comets, Captain.” He slid a black velvet box across the table. “Congratulations. Also, it’s time we told you this. My parents and two of Kitty’s aunts haven’t been contacted yet, either. And you know about several others, including Lucy’s folks.”
The revelation brought silence while the implications sank in. “It’s been two months and you haven’t said anything?” Gayle was livid. “Why would you keep something like this secret? And why tell us now?”
“I haven’t heard of anyone else who didn’t get word back that their folks are safe. So it’s just you and Kitty?” Stephen asked, glancing at Lucy.
“Somebody has figured out that you two are running the show,” Victor said pointedly.
“We never made any attempt to hide the fact in the first place, and there are a few others as well,” Simon said, shrugging his shoulders. “At least not after the first few weeks when we started to get rejects. We accepted a few people who later opted out when they found out how long they would be gone. Had the same problem with the first group Stephen brought aboard as I remember.”
“The reason we didn’t say anything until now was so that we could all get Libra finished,” Kitty said firmly. “Then we go back with all three ships and get our folks out.”
Simon spoke into the latest silence. “We don’t know for sure yet where they are, but it would be a reasonable guess that they’re at that same base the Parker girl exposed. With the number of Mambas available to us, as well as two battle cruisers and Galileo herself, we stage a diversion, drop a shuttle into that base and find our people. We release them quietly, so as not to embarrass their hosts, and then we sit down and talk about a technology release. It’s a game of I show you my power, now you show me yours. I intend to win the game hands down.”