A Rage for Revenge

62 A Small Piece of Truth

"Come on," said Lizard. She poked me out of my chair. "I'll buy you dinner." She pushed me quickly toward the door.

Two of the men in uniforms started toward us on an interception course, but Lizard just shook her head and kept on guiding me out. "Colonel Tirelli!" one of them called. She let the door cut him off.

They followed us out into the corridor. "Colonel!"

"Just keep moving," she said to me.

They were hurrying to catch up to us. General Wainright was sixtyish, red-faced, overweight, and out of breath. He spoke in exclamation points. The colonel looked like he'd been stamped from a mold.

The general said, "You're not going to get away with this, you know!"

"I don't know what you mean, sir. Now, if you'll excuse us, I have another appointment."

"You cooked that conference. You stacked the deck." The colonel grabbed her arm and stopped her where she stood. Lizard looked at his hand on her elbow.

"Should I deck him?" I asked. I was already stepping forward.

"You do and you're a dead man," the colonel said.

"I'm already dead," I replied; he didn't understand.

Lizard touched my arm. "I'll handle him, Jim." She looked at the man. "Colonel? How many of those fingers do you want broken?"

The general nodded at his aide. "Let go of her."

The colonel did so. The general said, "We know what you did. We know how you scheduled your flights. You've been pulling teams out of Colorado for a year. You deliberately allowed certain areas of infestation to get beyond manageable limits. You wanted to go in there with the nukes, didn't you?"

Lizard looked at him. "General, I've said everything I have to say to the President of the United States."

"You might be able to fool her!" blurted the colonel. I was sorry I wasn't going to be allowed to hit him. "That old grandmother's just a flunky for the Agency anyway."

"She's the commander in chief! By the highest law of this land. Maybe that's something you don't understand," Lizard said. She turned to the general. "This man-" She jerked her thumb at the colonel, "-is dangerously close to talking sedition! If you don't report him, I will!" Her eyes were blazing. She turned and stalked down the hall. I hurried to fallow after.

As we stepped into the elevator, I glanced back to see if they were following. They weren't. The elevator doors slid shut and Lizard burst out laughing.

"Huh? What's so funny'?"

She was punching the top button. "Everything. The worms are in the suburbs of Denver. General Wainright wants to drop the bomb-so do we-and we're at each other's throats because neither side wants to be left holding the bag if it doesn't work."

"Do we want to drop the bomb?"

"No," said Lizard. "We don't. It's just the only thing left that we haven't tried. After that, all we have left are fallback plans, and the president has authorized those too. We might have to abandon the whole planet."

"Huh? How-?"

The elevator doors opened and we came out into the security cage. Lizard put her palm on the clearance panel and the doors slid open. As we took the escalators down to the parking garage, Lizard explained, "If we have to, we can evacuate to the moon and the LS stations-by the way, Alpha was eighty-five percent complete when the plagues hit; it won't be too big a job to make it livable. It already holds ten percent atmosphere. We just have to send up enough gas to bring it up to livable pressure. It's doable. We know that there are still a hundred and eleven survivors in the Lunar stations. I don't know how they're hanging on, but they are. We can learn a lot from them. We estimate we can salvage maybe ten to fifteen percent of our ecology, plus germ plasm of maybe another ten or fifteen percent. Figure we'll lose the rest. We've already begun to evacuate the World Ecology Bank. We may do that if we evacuate the planet or not."

"How many people?" I asked.

"About five hundred thousand. And sperm samples from ten million more. The species' genetic heritage will be saved."

"But not the species."

"Not the species, right. Not unless we figure out some kind of sterilization that local flora and fauna can survive. Dr. Zymph isn't optimistic. Anything strong enough to kill Chtorrans would take out humans too. Here's the car."

I got in. "Where are we going?"

"Dinner, remember?"

"Why me?"

"Because," said Lizard, "it's very simple. I want you where no one else can get their hands on you. You know too much. Worse, you don't know what you know."

She started the car then. The motor whined up to inaudibility and we slid up and out into the Denver night. Lizard laughed abruptly. "The general was right. We did let that infestation get bigger than manageable. But not for the reasons he thinks. The nuclear option wasn't the only one. We've got five other alternatives to take out that camp. And the president knows those alternatives too. However, yes, we did cook that conference. We always do." She stopped grinning. "We didn't just cook it, we boiled it-right down to the essentials. We don't have time any more, Jim. We don't."

I nodded.

She fell silent. "What do I know?"

"I don't know," she said. "But I intend to find out."