Michaelmas

Ten

“Voila Hanrassy.”

The plane slid along. “What is it, Domino?” Michaelmas palmed the bones of his face. His fingertips massaged his eyes. His thumbs pressed into his ears, trying to break some of the blockage in his eustachian tubes.

“She’s placed a call to Allen Shell. She wants a scenario for telemetry- and voice-communication skewing in Norwood’s shuttle.”

“Ah.” Shell was at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. “How soon does she want it?”

“Within the hour.”

“It sounds more and more as if someone’s told her a tale and she’s attempting to verify it.”

“Exactly.”

“Yes.” The corners of Michaelmas’s mouth pulled back into his cheeks. He pictured Shell: a short, wiry man with a long fringe of hair and a little paunch, stumbling about his apartment and making breakfast coffee. He would probably make capuccino, assembling the ingredients and the coffee-maker clumsily, and he would take the second cup into the bathroom. Sitting on the stool with his eyes closed, sipping, he would mutter to himself in short hums through his partially compressed lips, and when he was done he would get up, find his phone where he’d left it, tell Viola Hanrassy two or three ways it might have been done undetectably, punch off, carry the empty cup and saucer to the dishwasher and very possibly drop them. Michaelmas and Shell had been classmates once. Shell had been one of the Illinois Institute of Technology students who intercepted and decoded Chicago police messages in the late 1960s, but time had passed. “Well.” Michaelmas looked downward. Tunis was much larger, dimmer, and off to the right. The African coastline was falling away toward Libya, so that they would still be over water for some distance, but Cité d’Afrique was not too far ahead in time. He glanced at his wrist. They’d land at about 1400 hours local time, he judged.

“The Norwood interview’s over,” Domino said. “Campion did roughly the same thing a few more times. It’ll be vicious when it hits.”

“Yes,” Michaelmas said ruminatively. “Yes, I suppose it could be.” He watched the office cabin door open. The camera operator and Clementine came out. She walked with her head down, her mouth wryly twisted. She took a vacant forward seat beside her crewman and did not once glance farther up the aisle. Campion and Frontiere were lingering in the cabin doorway. Campion was thanking Frontiere, and Norwood over Frontiere’s shoulder. Frontiere did not look entirely easy. When Campion turned away to come up the aisle, Frontiere firmly closed the door without letting Norwood out.

Michaelmas realized Campion was deliberately heading straight for him. Campion’s features had a fine sheen on them; that faint dew was the only immediate token of his past half hour’s labour. But he dropped rather hard into the seat beside Michaelmas, saying, “I hope you don’t mind,” and then sighed. He loosened his collar and arched his throat, stroking his neck momentarily between his thumb and fingers. “Welcome to the big time, Douglas,” he said in a fatigued voice.

Michaelmas smiled softly. “You’re doing well, I hear.”

Campion turned to him. “Coming from you, that’s a real compliment.” He shook his head. “I graduated today.” He shook his head again, leaned back, and stretched his legs out in front of him, the heels coming down audibly. He clasped his hands at the back of his head. “It’s hard, doing what we do,” he reminisced, looking up at the ceiling. “I never really understood that. I used to think that doing what you did was going to be easy for me. I’d grown up with you. I knew every mannerism you have. I can do perfect imitations of you at parties.” He rolled his face sideward and smiled companionably. “We all do. You know that, don’t you? All us young punks.”

Michaelmas shrugged with an embarrassed smile.

Campion grinned. “There must be ten thousand young Campions out there, still thinking that’s all there is to it.”

“There is more,” Michaelmas said.

“Of course there is.” Campion nodded to the ceiling. “There is,” he said with his right elbow just brushing the shoulder of Michaelmas’s jacket. “We’re the last free people in the world, aren’t we?”

“How do you mean that?”

“When I got a little older in this business, I wondered what had attracted me to it. The sophomore blahs, you know? You remember what it’s like, being junior staff. Just face front and read what they give you. I used to think I was never going to get out of that. I used to think the whole world had gone to Jell-O and I was right there in the middle of it. Nothing ever happened; you’d see some movement starting up, something acting like it was going to change things in the world, then it would peter out. Somebody’d start looking good, and then it would turn out he had more in the bank than he’d admit to, and he was allowed to graduate from his college after his father built a new gym. Or you’d want to know more about this new government programme for making jobs in the city, and it would turn out to be a real estate deal.”

“You began to realize the world had gotten too sophisticated for anything clear-cut to ever happen. And you know it’s only the simple things that make heroes. Give you something to understand in a few words; let you admire something without holding back. Right? How are you going to feel that, when you’re stuck in Jell-O and it’s obviously just going to get thicker and thicker as time passes? If it wasn’t for the hurricanes and the mining disasters, as a matter of fact, you might never know the difference between one day and the next.”

“I almost got out of it then. Had an offer to go into PR on the governor’s staff. Said no, finally. Once you’re in that, you can’t ever go back into news, you know? And I wasn’t ready to cut it all the way off. I thought about how, when I was a kid, I thought Laurent Michaelmas made the news, because you were always where it was happening And I said to myself, I’d give it one last all-the-way shot; I’d get up there where you were, so I wasn’t just stuck in some studio or on some payroll. Be cool, Douggie, I said to myself. Act like you’re on top, aim to get on top. Get up there - get out to where they have to scurry when they see you coming, and they open the doors, and they let you see what’s behind them. Get out where you rub elbows and get flown places in private equipment.” Campion’s eyes fastened on Michaelmas’s. “That’s it,” he said softly. “It’s not getting at the news. The news doesn’t mean anything. It’s being a newsman. It’s getting out of the Jell-O. And now we both know that.”

Michaelmas looked at him closely. “And that’s what you’ve come to tell me,” he said softly. “To get my approval.”

Campion blinked. “Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.” Then he smiled. “Sure! Why not? I could have a worse father figure, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Douggie. But you don’t need me any more. You’re a big boy now.”

Campion began to smile, then frowned a little and looked sidelong at Michaelmas. He bit his lip like a man wondering if his fly had been open all along, interwove his fingers tightly before him, stiffened his arms, turned his wrists, and cracked his knuckles. He began to say something else, then frowned again and sat staring at his out-thrust hands. He stood up quickly. “I have to cover a few things with those UNAC people,” he said, and walked over to the bar, where he asked for Perrier water and stood drinking it through white lips.

Domino said : “Allen Shell has called Hanrassy and given her a few alternatives. One of them requires live voice from Kosmgorod and a telemetry simulating component. The hardware cannot be assembled from off-the-shelf modules. It would have to be hand-built from bin parts. I imagine a knowledgeable engineer examining one could decide where its builder had gotten his technical training and done his shopping.”

Which would be good enough for all practical political purposes. Michaelmas grunted. “And then what happened ?”

“She put in a call for Frank Daugerd of McDonnell-Douglas. He’s on a fishing vacation at the Lake of the Ozarks and has his phone holding calls, but his next check-in is due at seven am. That will be 1400 hours at Cité d’Afrique. She’s not wasting the interval. She ordered an amphibian air taxi from Lambert Field and had it dispatched down to Bagnell Dam to wait.”

“Do you think she wants a second opinion on Allen’s scenario?”

“I doubt it. I think she wants Daugerd to come look at some holograms from a sweetmeat store as soon as she can get him to Cape Girardeau.”

“Yes. Indeed.”

Daugerd was the systems interfacing man for the prime contractor on the type of module Norwood had been using. Every six or eight months, he published something that made Michaelmas sit upright and begin conversing in equations with Domino. “Well, let me see, now,” Michaelmas said. “If she really does have holograms of the sender, then after he’s confirmed it looks Soviet, there’s only one more link to make. She’ll have to determine whether Norwood really did find it aboard the module.”

“Yes,” Domino said bleakly. “But she may be able to do that. Then she’ll brief her legislators, and they’ll go to town on it. UNAC’s dead by morning, and Theron Westrum may as well pack his household goods. The clock’s turned back twenty years.”

“You really see it that way?”

“Don’t you?”

It could play that way, right enough. Michaelmas smiled wistfully to himself. The way the world worked, once the word was out, the effect would take on inexhaustibility. There was always not merely the event itself, but opinion of the event, and rebuttal of the opinion, and the ready charge of self-interest, and the countercharge. There was the analysis of the event, and the placement of the event in the correct historical context. Everyone would want to kick the can, and it would clatter over the cobblestones interminably, far from the toes of those who’d first impelled it.

There was, for instance, the whole question of whether handsome, whip-thin Wheelwright Lundigan’s narrow and unexpected victory in the 1992 Presidential election had truly represented grassroots revulsion against a decade of isolationism, or whether Lundigan-Westrum had simply been a ticket with unexpectedly strong theatre. Then Lundigan’s fine-boned, sharp-eyed, volatile wife had shot him through the femoral artery for good but certainly not unprecedented reasons, two months into his term. So there was also some question of whether Westrum or other sinister forces had bribed, coerced, or hypnotized her into doing it. And whether One-World Westrum was Lundigan’s legitimate political heir, and then, again, what Lundigan’s actual politics had been, or if in fact a majority had wanted him to have them.

None of these dilemmas had ever been truly settled— certainly not by the even slimmer election of 1996, which had gone not so much to Westrum as to his mendacious promises that he’d continue the strong-Congress-weak-President tradition, some said. Others claimed arithmetical errors in the first computer-tallied national election. Few such questions in history were ever truly settled, and here they were, all right, still not rusted away, waiting to bounce round again.

For fresher echoes, if on a lesser scale, there were nearly infinite possibilities in Hanrassy’s authentication of the sender story. Shell’s and Daugerd’s reputations, and then those of their employers, and then those of Big Academe and Big Capital, would be at stake—and highly discussible — if the engineering scenario were questioned.

But meanwhile, Gately would be one of the first to burn to get on the air again, and, as it happened, the first open mike he’d come to would belong to EVM, which already had plenty of supporting footage showing Norwood and UNAC being appropriately evasive. It might be a little difficult to preserve a lighthearted tone while commenting on that development.

And in Moscow it would first be early evening and then night as the impact built. Once again, the managers of what was unaccountably not yet the inevitable system of the future would have to stay up late. The incredibly devious and bieskulturni Western nations always had the advantage of daylight. Impeccable ladies and gentlemen would have to leave off playing with their children after supper, or would have to forego the Bolshoi. They would hurry for the Presidium chamber, there to spell out the obvious motives behind this fantastic fabrication by the rabid forces of resurgent reaction. In dignity and full consciousness of moral superiority, with the cameras and microphones recording every solemn moment of the indictment, they would let fall adjectives.

And true, Theron Westrum could forget about his so-called third term. The chances were excellent Viola Hanrassy would be the Twenty-first-century President. If that was not exactly turning back a political generation in the world, it was close enough. But in this generation the Soviets did not have so many immediate worries along their Asiatic borders to keep their pursuit of redress from being entirely single-minded. Which was a word one also applied readily to Viola. There was a hell of a lot more to her than there was to Theron, if you saw the Presidential job as defending the homestead in the forest rather than building roads to the marketplaces.

All that in the blink of an eye, Michaelmas thought. As if I had never been at all. He shook his head in wonderment. Well, there was no gainsaying it —he’d always known he was a plasterer. It would take more time than any one person was ever given to really overhaul the foundations that put the recurring cracks in the walls.

“Are you sitting there being broody again?” Domino said.

“I think I’ve earned the privilege.”

“Well, cash it in on your own time. What’s our next move?”

Michaelmas grinned. “First, I have to go to the lavatory,” he said with some smugness.

But Domino followed him in. “Papashvilly,” he said.

Michaelmas fumbled the door lock shut. “What is it?”

“That first device was just activated. The next person entering the elevator at Papashvilly’s floor and selecting lobby level will have a rough ride. What has burned itself out is the circuit that dampens speed as the car approaches its stop and then aligns the car door with floor level. The passenger will be jounced severely; broken bones are a good possibility.”

“What can you do?” Michaelmas worked at his clothes.

“Keep Papashvilly locked up. He hasn’t found that out yet. But he will soon. Someone will come to get him.”

“What activated the device?”

“I don’t know. But it happened while he was ostensibly receiving an incoming call. It was from a staffer reminding him that he was expected down in the lobby when Norwood arrives. I answered it for him, but of course no one knows that. The component burned on the word lobby.”

“It monitored his phone calls.”

“I think so. I think I could design such a device; it would be a very tight squeeze.”

Michaelmas pulled up his zipper. “So you weren’t able to trace a signaller because there wasn’t any, strictly speaking.”

“The staffer may be a conspirator,” Domino said dubiously. “I’ve checked his record. It looks clean.”

“So what they’ve done is mined everything around Pavel, set to trigger from expectable routine events, and any one of them could plausibly cripple or kill. Sooner or later, they’ll get him. And never be known, or found. That’s good technology.” He rinsed the soap from his hands.

“Yes.”

Michaelmas shook his head. He dried his hands in the air jet, stopping while they were still a little damp and wiping his face with them. “Well, hold the fort as best you can. I’m thinking hard. So many things to keep track of,” he said. “I’m glad I have you.”

“Would sometimes that I had a vote in the matter. Button your coat.”

When he emerged, Michaelmas said “Look sharp” to Domino, and moved down the aisle toward the office. He passed quickly beyond Clementine’s seat. The same press aide who had let him slip down the corridor at Limberg’s now rose smoothly from the lounge nearest the office door. “Mr Michaelmas,” he smiled. “Signor Frontiere is in a brief meeting with Colonel Norwood. May I help you with something meanwhile?”

Michaelmas said : “UNAC hospitality is always gracious. I’m quite comfortable, thank you.” He relaxed against the partition, and he and the aide exchanged pleasantries for a few score miles. Domino’s terminal hung from Michaelmas’s shoulder and rested flush against the bulkhead. “Harry Beloit,” the aide was saying, “but I’m from Madison. My dad taught Communications at Wisconsin, and I guess it just crept into me over the dinner table.” Inside the office, Norwood was saying in an insufficiently puzzled tone: “Maybe I don’t understand, Getulio. But I think we should have told Campion the whole story. Hell, he’s not going to be out with it until tonight. By then there’s not going to be any doubt where that component came from.”

Frontiere took a noticeably deep breach: “By then we will not know any more than who seems to have made the thing. We won’t know who installed it, what they represent, or why they did it. There are many more doubts than facts, and—”

“Oh, yes, I get back as often as I can: especially in the fall. I go out to Horicon Marsh and watch the waterfowl gathering. Pack a lunch, bring along my favourite pipe, just sit with the wife on a blanket and try to teach the kids the difference between a teal and a canvasback, you know.”

“ — ulio, look, the only way all of these doubts of yours make sense is if they expected it not to work. You follow me? If whoever did it was counting on my turning up with the part in my hand. I don’t think they could have been counting on that. I think they expected me and it to be all blown away. So I think the people who did it are the people who look like they did it, you know?”

“They fly altogether differently. You can tell from the wingbeats when they’re just coming into sight. My dad showed me.”

“I’ve run a stress analysis on Norwood’s voice. There’s the overlay of irritation, of course. But he’s sincere. He’s completely relaxed with himself; knows who he is, what he’s saying, what’s right, and he’s right.”

“That may all be, but it is not conclusive, nevertheless. We are not going to destroy UNAC and perhaps a great deal more on the basis of a supposition. Now, in a few moments, unless I can delay long enough, you’ll be speaking with Laurent Michaelmas, whom you would not be advised to underestimate, and —”

“Canada geese. They’re altogether different; they’re bigger, they beat slower. You know, by and large, the bigger the bird is, the less often it beats its wings. Sometimes I think that if you could see a pteranodon coming in out of the west at dusk, silhouetted against the sun, first you’d pick up the dot of its body, and then gradually you’d see little dark stubs growing out one to each side, as you began picking up the profile of the wings, and they’d never move. It would just get bigger and pick up more definition, and you’d see those motionless wings just extending themselves farther and farther out to the side, completely silent, just getting closer like it was riding a string from the top of the sky right to the bridge of your—”

“I don’t think I have to make these estimates. I’m an engineer, and I ran all the tests you’d want on that component. Now, I’m military, and I understand following orders, and I hope I’m capable of grasping big pictures. But there’s no way you’re going to get me to change my opinion on what it all means. Now, I know it’s a big Goddamned disappointment to you, and maybe a lot of the rest of the world, and maybe even to me. Pavel and I are good buddies, and this whole idea’s had a lot of promise. But I just don’t see it any way except that the boys in Moscow said, ”All right, that’s long enough playing nice and catching our breath, now let’s go back to doing business in the good old-fashioned way.“ And I don’t think it matters what you’d like to think, or I’d like to think, or how many good buddies we’ve got all over the world, I think we’ve got to face up to what really was done, and I think we’ve got to go from there. And damned quick.”

“Nevertheless, until superior authority tells you what is to be done —”

“Yes, sir, for as long as I’m detailed to serve under that authority, that’s exactly correct.”

“Signals. You know, everything that lives is constantly sending out signals. My dad pointed that out to me. It’s how animals teach and control their young, it’s how they mate, it’s how they move in groups from place to place. They’ve got these fantastic vocabularies of movement, cry, and odour. Any member of any species knows them all. It can recognize its own kind when you’d swear there was nothing out there, and it knows immediately whether that other creature is sick or well, at rest or frightened, feeding or searching, or whatever.”

“Mr Michaelmas, he’s going to resign and talk if he gets no satisfaction.”

“Yes.”

“They know all of that about each other all the time. I guess that’s about all there is to know in this world, really. Seems a shame the animal that signals the most seems to need individuals like me to help it along, and even so—”

“Even so,” Michaelmas said. “Even so, we’re the only animal whose signals can’t be trusted by its own kind.” He smiled. “Except for thee and me, of course.”

Harry Beloit smiled with awkward kinship. Then the plane tilted and he glanced out a window. “We’ll be in the Afrique approach pattern in a few moments,” he said. “I’m sorry—it seems as if Signor Frontiere’s and Colonel Norwood’s conference took longer than expected.”

“No matter,” Michaelmas said equably. “I’ll catch them in the limousine.” He waved a hand gently and turned. “Ours was a pleasant conversation.” He moved up the aisle until he reached Clementine. Putting one buttock on the armrest of the seat across the aisle, he smiled at her. She had been sitting with her eyes down, her lips a little pursed and grim. “A pleasant flight?” he said politely.

Domino snorted.

Clementine looked up at Michaelmas. “It’s a very comfortable aircraft.”

“How do you find working with Campion?”

She raised an eyebrow. “One is a professional.” It had very much been not the sort of question one is asked.

“Of course,” Michaelmas said. “I don’t doubt it. Since this morning I’ve made it my business to look into your career. Your accomplishments bear out my personal impression.”

She smiled with a touch of the wistful. “Thank you. It’s a day-to-day thing, however, isn’t it? You can’t remain still if you wish to advance.”

He smiled. “No. No, of course not. But you seem well situated. A very bright star in a rapidly growing organization, and now in one day you have credits with me and with a rising personality, both on a major story…”

“Yes, he is rising overnight,” Clementine said, unconsciously jerking her head toward the back of the plane. “Not a Campion but a mushroom,” she said in French.

Michaelmas smiled. Then he giggled. He found he could not control it. Little tears came to his eyes. Domino said, “Stop that! Good heavens!”

Clementine was staring at him, her hand masking her mouth, her own shoulders shaking. “Incredible! You look like the little boy when the schoolmaster trips.”

He still could not bring himself to a halt. “But you, my dear, are the one Who soaped the steps.”

They laughed together, as decorously as possible, until they had both run down and sat gasping. It was incredible how relieved Michaelmas felt. He was completely unconcerned that people up the aisle were staring at them, or that Luis, the camera operator, sat beside Clementine stiffly looking out the window like a gentleman diner overhearing a jest between waiters.

Finally, Clementine dabbed under her eyes with the tips of her fingers and began delving into her purse. She said: “Ah. Ah, Laurent, nevertheless,” more soberly now, “this afternoon there’s been something I could have stopped. You’ll see it tonight and say, Here something was done that she could surely have interrupted, if she weren’t so professional. ” She opened her compact and touched her cheeks with a powder pad. She looked up and sideward at Michaelmas. “But it is not professional of me to say so. We have shocked Luis.”

The camera operator’s lip twitched. He continued to stare out his window with his jaw in his palm. “I do not listen to private conversations,” he said correctly. “Especially not about quick-witted people who instruct in technique to something they call crew.”

Michaelmas grinned. “Viva Luis,” he said softly. He put his hand on Clementine’s wrist and said: “Whatever was done — do you think it serves the truth?”

“Oh, the truth, yes,” Clementine said.

“She means it,” Domino said. “She’s a little elevated, but simple outrage would account for that. There’s no stab of guilt.”

“Yes, her pulse didn’t change,” Michaelmas said to him, bending over Clementine’s hand to make his farewell. He said to her: “Ah, well, then, whatever else there is, is bearable. I had best sit down somewhere now.” Campion would be back down here in a minute, ready to discuss what was to be done as soon as they landed. “Au revoir”

“Certainement.”

“Daugerd checked his phone early,” Domino said. “It’s a terrible day for fishing; pouring rain. He’s returned Hanrassy’s call; she had something that needs his professional appraisal. He’s running his bass boat down to the Bagnell Dam town landing to meet that plane of hers. Bass boats are fast. His ETA at her property will be something like seven-forty her time — about half an hour after you deplane at Cité d’Afrique.”

Michaelmas touched his lips to the back of Clementine’s hand, feeling the fragility of the bones, and moved up the aisle. Campion watched him warily.

“Sincere, you say,” Michaelmas said to Domino as he dropped into a seat. “Norwood.”

“Absolutely. I wish I had that man’s conscience.”

“Do you suppose,” Michaelmas ventured, “that something is bringing in people from a parallel world? Eh?” He stared out the window, his jaw in his palm, as the coast slid below them. The Mediterranean was not blue but green like any other water, and the margins of the coast were so rumpled into yellow shallows and bars that on this surfless day it was almost impossible to decide whether they would fall on land or water. “You know the theory? Every world event produces alternative outcomes? There is a world in which John Wilkes Booth missed and Andrew Johnson was never President, so there was much less early clamour for threatening Nixon with impeachment? So he didn’t name Jerry Ford, but someone else, instead? The point being that Lincoln never knew he was dead, and Ford never dreamed he’d been President.”

“I know that concept,” Domino said shortly. “It’s sheer anthropomorphism.”

“Hmm. I suppose. Yet he is sincere, you tell me.”

“Hold his hand.”

Michaelmas smiled off-center. “He’s dead.”

“How?”

The landing warnings came on. Michaelmas adjusted his seat and his belt.

“I don’t know, friend… I don’t know,” he mused. He continued to stare out the window as the plane settled lower with its various auxiliaries whining and thumping. The wings extended their flaps and edge-fences in great sooty pinions; coronal discharges flickered among the spiny de-perturbance rakes. “I don’t know… but then, if God had really intended Man to think, He would have given him brains, I suppose.”

“Oh, wow,” Domino said.

They swept in over the folded hills that protected Cité d’Afrique from serious launch pad errors at Star Control. To Michaelmas’s right, the UNAC complex was a rigid arrangement pile-driven into the desert; booster sheds, pads, fuel dumps, guidance bunkers, and the single prismatic tower where UNAC staff dwelled and sported and took the elevators down or up to their offices or the lobby. The structures seemed isolated: menhirs erected on a plain once green, now the peculiar lichenous shade of scrubby desert, very much like the earliest television colour pictures of the Moon. These were connected to each other by animal trails which were in fact service roads, bound to the hills by the highway cutting straight for Cite d’Afrique, and except for that white and sparsely travelled lifeline, adrift — probably clockwise, like the continent itself. Beyond it there was only a browning toward sand and a chasming toward sky, and Saint-Exupery flying, flying, straining his ears to filter out the sound of the slipstream in his guy wires, listening only to the increasingly harsh sound of engine valves labouring under a deficiency of lubricating oil, wiping his goggles impatiently and peering over the side of the cockpit for signs of life.

Michaelmas looked down at his quiescent hands.

Now they were over the hills, and then the ground dropped sharply. Cite d’Afrique opened before them. The sunlight upon it was like the scimitars of Allah. It was all a tumble of shahmat boards down there: white north surfaces, all other sides energy-absorbent black, metallized glass lancing reflections back at catcher panels, louvers, shadow banners, clash of metal chimes, street cries, robed men like knights, limousine horns, foreigners moving diagonally, the bazaar smell newly settled into recently wet mortar but not quite yet victorious over aldehydes outbaking from the plastics, and Konstantinos Cikoumas, Michaelmas saw him as a tall, cadaverous, round-eyed, open-mouthed man in a six-hundred-dollar suit and a grocer’s apron with a screwdriver in its bib pocket. He did not see where Cikoumas was or what he was doing at the moment, and he could not guess what the man thought.

They had made Cite d’Afrique in no longer than it takes to pull UN out of New York and decree a new city. Not as old as the youngest of sheikhs, it was the new cosmopolitan centre. Its language was French because the men with hawk faces knew French as the diplomatic and banking language of the world, but it was not a French city, and its interests were not confined to those of Africa. It was, the UN expected, a harbinger of a new world. Eloquent men had ventured to say that only by making a place totally divorced from nationalistic pressures could the United Nations function as required, and so they had moved here.

Michaelmas asked Domino : “What’s the situation at the terminal?”

“There’s a fair amount of journalist activity. They have themselves set up at the UNAC gate. You hired the best local crew, and they know the ropes, so they’re situated at a good angle. EVM has a local man there to shoot backup footage of Norwood debarking. Then there are UNAC people at the gate, of course, to welcome Norwood, although none of them are very high up the ladder, and there are curious members of the public — mostly UN personnel and diplomats who got early word Norwood was coming in by this route. And so forth.”

“Very good. Uh, we may be calling upon your Don’t Touch circuit some time along in there.”

“Oh, really?” Domino said.

“Yes. I believe I have taken an instructive lesson from the Ecole Psychologique of Marseilles. Other topic: Do you have a scan on where Konstantinos Cikoumas lives?”

“Certainly. A nice modern apartment with a view of the sea. Nothing exceptional in it. Nothing like the stuff planted all over Star Control. But then, why should they risk Kosta’s ever being tied to any exotic machinery that might accidentally be found in the vicinity? He and his brother are honest merchants, after all, and who’s to ever say different ? Kristiades called him this afternoon, by the way. At about the time we left Berne. A routine talk concerning almonds. It doesn’t yield to cryptanalysis. But the fact of the call itself may be his way of saying Norwood’s en route, meaning there’ll be plenty of press to cover any accidents to Papashvilly.”

“You’d think,” Michaelmas grumbled, “UNAC might look more deeply at who comes and goes through Star Control.”

“They do. They think they do. But they don’t think in terms of this sort of attack. They think in terms of someone ripping off souvenirs or trying to sell insurance; maybe an occasional lone flat-Earther; maybe someone who’d like to be an ardent lover. Look what they’ve done - they’ve put Papashvilly in his own apartment, which they consider is secure, which it is, and fully private, and they’ve left him alone. He’s playing belly-dance recordings and drinking Turkish coffee, oblivious as a lamb.”

Michaelmas snorted. “He eats lamb. But something’s got to be done; they’re piling trash all around my ability to concentrate.” He blinked vigorously, sitting up in his seat, and rubbed his eyes, now that he’d remembered himself. He felt the taste of verdigris far back on his tongue, and growled softly to himself. Except that Domino overheard it, of course. There is no God-damned privacy! he thought. None whatever. Any day now, he decided, Domino’s receptor in his skull would begin being able to receive harmonics from his brain electrical activity, and then it would be just a matter of time before they became readable.

Merde! he cried in his mind, and hurled something down a long, narrowing dark hallway. “All right. Are you sure you’ve found all the little gimmicks around Papashvilly?”

“I’ve swept the main building, and everything else Papashvilly might approach. I’m fairly certain I have them. I don’t understand,” Domino said peevishly, “where they got so many of them, or who thought of them, or why this technique. It seems to me they’d want to plant one good bomb and get it over with.”

“Not if what they want to kill is the whole idea of effective astronautics. They don’t want isolated misfortunes. They want a pattern of wrangling and doubt. They want to roil up the world’s mind on the subject. Damn them, they’re trying to gnaw the twentieth century to death. They just don’t want us poking around the Solar System. Their Solar System? Any ideas along those lines?”

“I believe they are the descendants of the lost Atlantean civilization,” Domino said. “Returning from their former interstellar colonies and battling for their birthright. It seems only fair.”

“Very good. Now, the gadgets. Do you understand what each of those gadgets could do?”

“I think so. There’s a nearly infinite variety. Some will start fires and cut off the adjacent heat sensors simultaneously. Others will most likely do things such as overloading Papashvilly’s personal car steering controls—at a moderate speed if you’re right, at a higher one if you’re not. The elevator you know about. There’s something I think will cut out the air-conditioning to his block of flats, probably at the same time the night-heater thermostat oversets. If I were doing it, that would also be the time the fire doors all dropped shut, sealing off that wing with him inside it, at, say, no degrees Fahrenheit. Should I go on?”

“That will do for samples. Are all of these pieces wired into the building circuits?”

“All that aren’t concerned with free-standing machinery like the car. They’re all perfect normal-acting components —with a plus.”

“All right. I’ve been thinking. You could trip them, couldn’t you? You tested that elevator part.”

“Right,” Domino said slowly. “I could. Use the building systems to give 'em an overload jolt of current. That would fry 'em as surely as their own triggers could.”

Michaelmas steepled his fingertips. “Well, that’s all right, then. How’s this for a sequence: At the appropriate time, Pavel gets a call to come down to the lobby. You let his door open. He goes out in the hall, and the tampered elevator won’t open its doors; you can do that through the normal systems. So he has to take another. Make sure it’s a clean one. Meanwhile, you’re tidying up behind him. As soon as he clears each problem area, you blow each of the gimmicks in it. By the time he’s down to ground level, the building will be safe for him. A little disarranged, but safe. A priority repair order to the garage systems ties up his car, should he get it into his head to go for a spin. Et cetera. Good scenario?”

Domino made a peculiar noise. “Oh, my, yes. Can do. When do you want it?”

“When appropriate. UNAC will surely call him to come down when Norwood is almost there. Initiate it then.”

“All right.”

“And Konstantinos Cikoumas. Let him get a call from a UNAC funtionary right away, inviting him to join the greeters at the airport gate.”

“No problem.”

“Excellent. He has plenty of gates and things to pass through as he approaches the debarking ramp, right? Heat locks, friskers, and so forth.”

“It’s a hot country. And it’s an ultramodern airport, yes.”

“Make sure he has no difficulty arriving at the last gate exactly on time, will you?”

“No problem. He’s already left his apartment; I’m monitoring his cab’s dispatch link. And I can help or hinder with the traffic signals.”

“There, now,” Michaelmas said with a sigh. “Remember, he’s coming through the last gate as Norwood arrives.”

“Absolutely,” Domino made the noise again; this time, he seemed to manage it a little better.

Michaelmas ignored it. He cook a deep breath and settled back in his seat. “Pillar to post,” he muttered. “Pillar to post.”

The plane flared out past the outer marker, and Michaelmas folded his hands loosely in his lap. In a few moments it was down, tyres thumping as the thin air marginally failed to provide a sufficient cushion. There were the usual roarings and soft cabin chimes, and surging apparent alterations in the direction his body wanted to go. There was a sharp change in the smell of the cabin as the air-conditioning sucked in the on-shore breeze, chilled it, and the relative humidity rose thirty percent in an instant.

“Frank Daugerd is airborne from the Lake of the Ozarks,” Domino said. “His pilot has filed an ETA of 07:35, their time. That’s thirty-three minutes from now.”

“And then… let’s see…” Michaelmas rubbed his nose; his sinuses were stuffed. He grimaced and counted it up in his head : the touchdown on the Mississippi, floats pluming the water, and the drift down to the landing. The waiting USA staffer with the golf cart, and the silent, gliding run from the landing up the winding crushed-shell drive to the east portico; the doors opening, and Daugerd disappearing inside, haunched and busy, still wearing his fishing vest and hat, probably holding his hand over the bowl of his pipe; the conversation with Hanrassy, the bending over the table, the walking around the holograms, the snap decision and then the thoughtful review of the decision, the frowning, the looking closer, and then, for good and all, the nod of confirmation, the farewell handshake with Hanrassy, the departure from the room, and Hanrassy reaching for her telephone. “Ten minutes? Fifteen? Between the time he lands at her dock and the time she reacts to a confirmation?”

“Yes,” Domino said. “That’s how I count it. Adding it all up, fifty minutes from now, all she’ll have left to do is call Gately and have him call Norwood the direct question, Norwood gives the direct answer, Gately’s back on the phone to Hanrassy, and Bob’s your uncle. One hour from now, total, it’s all over.”

“Ah, if men had the self-denial of Suleiman the Wise,” Michaelmas said, “to flask the clamorous djinns that men unseal.”

“What’s that from?”

“From me. I just made it up. These things come to my mind. Isn’t it bloody awful?” He winced; his voice seemed to echo through the back of his neck and rebound from the inner surfaces of his eardrums. The price of wit.

A cabin attendant said nasally over the PA: “We shall be at the UNAC deplaning area shortly. Please retain your seats until we have come to a complete stop.”

Michaelmas unclenched his hands, opened his seatbelt, rose, and moved deftly down the aisle. He passed between Campion and Clementine, and dropped lightly into the forward seat beside Harry Beloit. “I’ll just want a word with Getulio before we get into all the bustle at the terminal,” he said. “That’ll be possible, won’t it?” he smiled engagingly.

Beloit returned the smile. “No problem.” He understood. Whatever Michaelmas might say to Getulio at this point was irrelevant. The famous newsman simply needed a reason to be with Frontiere at the deplaning since Norwood would also be kept in close proximity, and therefore all three of them would be on camera together at the arrival gate. That would include Campion’s camera. There was such a thing as giving ground in a statesmanly manner while the plane was in the air and Campion had first call on the astronaut’s time. There was another thing entirely in being upstaged before the world.

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 incorporated an oscillator circuit that leaked into the metal case when required to do so. It was possible to deliver a harmless 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.