Starfire

8

Celine had been half right. Nick Lopez’s staff on the World Protection Federation did not know where he was, but they could certainly exchange messages. Celine’s request for an “urgent and highly sensitive” meeting had been forwarded to Nick as soon as it came in. Normally he would have answered at once, but for the moment something more urgent was on his mind.

What was happening to the aircraft?

He was on his way from Washington to a private meeting with Gordy Rolfe, and all their previous sessions had taken place either at the World Protection Federation offices in New Rio or at The Flaunt, the corporate headquarters of the Argos Group. The steel-and-glass splinter of The Flaunt towered four thousand feet above the Palladian architecture of Houston, and Gordy’s summit suite overlooked the rebuilt city. Nick had assumed that they would use the same rendezvous site today. That would give him a comfortable and productive flight of at least an hour and a half, during which he could attend to other business. But his craft was beginning its descent less than twenty minutes after takeoff.

He glanced at the telltales and saw that all mechanical and electronic conditions were normal. The weather was clear and fine. Still the vehicle went on descending. He checked the Automatic Vehicle Control. The AVC’s destination coordinates had been provided from Gordy Rolfe’s office, and Nick had never thought to question them. But instead of the glitter of The Flaunt ahead there was only a peaceful landscape of rural Virginia.

The craft went into a gentle bank, and as it leveled off Nick caught sight of a runway. The black strip was short, and it was narrow, but from the way that the vehicle was behaving, a full electronic landing system was in operation.

Nick could see no sign of any other aircraft. He waited through the gentle touchdown and taxi to the end of the runway. Then he slid open the hatch and allowed the glide stair to carry him from plane to ground.

He found himself standing in a shallow valley, with low grassy hills to the east and more substantial wooded mountains to the west. A solitary building hugged the ground two hundred yards past the end of the runway. Beside it rose strange shapes, red and green and yellow, oddly angular and complex in the late afternoon light. He began to walk toward them.

At the moment when he recognized both the building and its neighboring structures — it was an old school-house, its playground still filled with brightly painted seesaws and monkey bars — a figure emerged from the schoolhouse door.

Gordy Rolfe was easy to identify. He was diminutive, with a head too big for the slender body. A great sculptured upsweep of snow-white hair exaggerated the disproportion. It was styled for effect, as were the big steel-rimmed glasses. A black jumpsuit, Rolfe’s standard attire, emphasized rather than disguised the crooked back and uneven shoulders.

Rolfe did not walk toward Nick. He waited, leaning against the schoolhouse wall. When the two were within earshot, he said, “Don’t judge this place by appearances, Senator. I learned to read and write in there.”

“I guessed as much.” Lopez peered in through one of the windows. “Been a while since the school was used, though.”

“You knew where we were going to meet?”

“Not until we landed. I thought I was headed for Houston. But I’ve seen pictures of this place before. I was Senate Majority Leader in Washington when the headquarters of the Legion of Argos was raided and the Eye of God was taken prisoner. The old headquarters is directly beneath us, isn’t it? We had pictures of the whole attack plastered all over the place.”

“So did we.” Rolfe grimaced, increasing his likeness to a sinister elf. “Of course, the Legion members had a rather different view of events.”

Nick Lopez nodded. He was round-faced and brown-complexioned, and the hair above his broad brow was set in a high, old-fashioned pompadour. Despite Rolfe’s extravagant coiffure, Lopez towered a foot and a half above the other man. “Did you know her well?”

“Pearl Lazenby — the Eye of God?” The gray eyes behind their big lenses glittered, and Gordy laughed harshly. “Fucking right I knew her. From the time I was six until I was seventeen she was more important than my own parents. Of course, for a lot of that time she was serving a sentence in judicial sleep. But there was morning-noon-and-night talk of her, and I was raised with her rules.”

Raised by the members of the Legion of Argos, Nick thought, with their rigid attitudes. Lots of prayer, lots of dogma, lots of discipline and harsh punishment. But no medical treatment to make Gordy Rolfe of normal height, even though that had been a standard procedure long before the supernova. No simple corrective changes to his vision, to make those anachronistic eyeglasses unnecessary. No protocol to adjust the spinal curvature that threw the right shoulder a little lower than the left. It was no wonder that the head of the Argos Group now had his own rigidity and strangeness.

Nick said only, “I’m surprised that you can stand to come back here, with all those memories.”

“Stand to come here?” Gordy Rolfe twisted his head to look sideways up at Nick, even though Lopez had stooped slightly to see in through the classroom window. “Senator, you’re so-o wrong.” He moved into the schoolroom, gesturing to Lopez to follow. “When the Eye of God was recaptured and taken away to be put back into judicial sleep, my mother and father and the other Legion members wailed and moaned and acted like it was the end of the world. Me, I did the same — in public. But in private I danced. Pearl Lazenby scared me shitless. When I heard that she had died after three more months in judicial sleep it was the happiest day of my life.”

“Were you still here then, with the Legion?”

“Yeah. But it was already starting to fall apart. See, the Eye had prophesied that she’d wake up at a time of great disaster and lead the Legion members to take over the whole world. The supernova happened, and they hauled her out of judicial sleep. The prophecy was validated. Everyone said, this is it. They were primed and ready to go. Pearl assured them that the great victory of the Legion of Argos was only days away. Then the boys from Washington came in here and grabbed her, and suddenly the holy cleansing was over before it started.”

“Not just the boys. Did you know that Tanaka led them here?”

Gordy Rolfe stood in front of a bank of three old elevators, ready to enter the middle one. He swung around sharply at Lopez’s question. “President Tanaka? I thought she was off on the Mars expedition when the gamma pulse hit. That’s what her bio said when she ran for President.”

“She was. She got back just in time to help Special Forces capture Pearl Lazenby.”

“Then I owe her one. Hell, if I’d known that, I might have voted for her. Anyway, when Pearl was taken away, nobody in the Legion could believe it. Her prophesy had been wrong, see, and when she prophesied as the Eye of God she was supposed to be infallible. Some of the old-timers tried to weasel round that, but the newer members weren’t buying. People started leaving.”

“Not you, though.” Lopez followed Rolfe into the elevator.

“No.” Gordy Rolfe pressed the bottom button, which bore an icon like a flaming torch, and they began to descend. “Once she was out of the way, why leave? There were opportunities for a genius at headquarters.”

“A genius like you?”

“Who else? I knew I had talent. And I didn’t know a damn thing about the world outside. I stayed behind, looked at what the Legion was ready to walk away from, and started work. That was the beginning of the Argos Group. Houston is the official headquarters, but I prefer this. I come here more and more often.”

The elevator was descending, slowly and noisily. Nick wondered what would happen if it broke and they became stuck a thousand feet underground. He decided that anyone able to design and build robots as complex and capable as the rolfes would certainly have allowed for elevator maintenance. Gordy was just doing what Nick had so often done, choosing a meeting place where he had the psychological advantage. Probably there were other surprises ahead.

But not, perhaps, at once. The elevator creaked to a stop and the door opened on a long chamber painted in gunmetal gray. Every few feet along the walls, Nick saw a lurid and unvarying design: the scarlet talons of a bird enclosing a green globe.

He stopped by one of the painted symbols. “The original symbol of the Eye of God.”

“Yeah. I didn’t change the paintings down here; they’re all over most of the walls. Don’t you think it makes a nice official emblem for the Argos Group?”

Rolfe’s voice burned with a nervous energy that Nick Lopez encountered only in his meetings with Gordy. Even with the aid of telomod therapy, how long could a man operate at that level of intensity? Rolfe was forty-three years old and he looked over sixty.

Nick made his own reply deliberately casual. “It all seems pretty run-down. I assume we’ll have a shielded environment where we can talk?”

“Right here. We can start anytime. I doubt there’s another human within five miles, and we’ll be under a thousand feet of rock and earth. That’s good against most taps — unless one of us is recording.”

Which, as it happens, I’m not. But we would both deny it if we were. Nick ignored the patronizing tone and the implied question and ducked his head to follow Gordy Rolfe up a tight spiral staircase of gray metal designed for someone a foot shorter than Nick Lopez. At the top Rolfe paused to operate a circular hatch, locked from below. Nick wondered about that. Wouldn’t a private hideaway be more logically locked from the other side? He had seen nothing to stop anyone from wandering into the old schoolroom and taking the elevator down.

Nick followed Gordy through the hatch, straightened, and glanced around him. “I don’t remember talk of anything like this when the Legion of Argos was in the media. Is it new?”

“Depends what you mean by ’new.’ ” Gordy Rolfe closed the hatch. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched Nick’s examination of their surroundings. For a change, he seemed genuinely pleased. “None of this was here in Pearl Lazenby’s time. I’ve been developing it for twenty years.”

The spiral staircase and entry hatch led to the center of an enormous room that was at first glance a conventional combination of living space, engineering laboratory, and office. A compact kitchen, complete with generous storage cabinets, sat behind a waist-high partition on the left. On the other side of the partition was a bedroom and a small closed-off area that Nick assumed must be a bathroom. The office was well equipped with desks, chairs, files, communications equipment, and three-dimensional display volumes. Next to it sat the work area, its long lab bench covered with tools and a mass of electronic test equipment. Half a dozen rolfes in various stages of disassembly stood along the wall.

That wall was the most unusual feature of the room. It formed one continuous circular barrier about twenty meters across, rising vertically to a white ceiling far above their heads. A single bulbous door, set in the wall close to ground level, provided an entrance big enough for a man to walk through. The door, like the wall, was transparent. Beyond lay a jungle of dense vegetation, stretching away for an indeterminate distance.

Nick Lopez craned his head back, seeking the source of light. It came from the ceiling, not as a discrete source but as a continuous glow.

“Matches the solar spectrum,” Gordy Rolfe said, “and it follows the surface diurnal rhythm. It’s late afternoon there, so it’s late afternoon here. If we want light later we’ll have to turn on separate units in my office. I don’t often do that, because I want the habitat to mimic natural conditions.”

“You mean out there, where the plants are?” Nick had walked forward to take a closer look at the wall and door. Beyond the barrier the plants grew dense and to shoulder height. The vegetation had an odd blue tinge to it. Nick rubbed the smooth wall, then rapped on it with his fist.

“Not just plants. Animals too.” Gordy Rolfe came to his side. “Go ahead, hit as hard as you like. You won’t make a dent in it. It’s hardened plastic, half an inch thick and stronger than steel. It runs all the way to the ceiling. The door has mechanical as well as electronic locks, and it can only be opened from this side.”

Nick Lopez backed away from the wall. He was not a nervous man, but this didn’t feel like one of Gordy Rolfe’s mind games. He saw the tops of a group of dark green ferny plants swaying, as though animals were moving below or behind them. “You have something dangerous out there?”

“Let’s say middling dangerous if you went in there bare-handed. Years ago I had things that you wouldn’t want to get within a mile of, but now I have other reasons for keeping the habitat sealed off. It took twenty years to create two thousand acres of controlled environment — three square miles of land and water — where I can run well-designed and controlled experiments. If visitors found their way in and meddled with what I’m doing, they would ruin everything.”

“But there’s nothing dangerous in there now}” Nick found himself reluctant to turn his back on the door.

“I told you, there’s nothing dangerous to an armed man. But I’ve got some fascinating work going on in the habitat. When it gets darker we’ll take a look.” Gordy smiled at Nick’s expression. “No, I don’t mean that we’ll go in. See the rovers? We’ll send one of them.”

Now that they were pointed out, Nick saw two of them. They were squat vehicles about three feet long, with eight thin jointed legs along their sides. At their front end a long, segmented neck rose to a round head circled with ruby sensors. They sat facing the wall of the chamber, not far from the door.

Nick said, “They look like the rolfes that Colombo and his group use in shield work.”

“Yeah.” Rolfe nodded. “Similar technology, though these are a bit smarter. Colombo paid top price, but I keep the best for myself. These rover rolfes are intelligent enough to wander the habitat — it’s tricky in places — without getting stuck. I just tell them where I want them to go, and they figure out the rest. What they see will be displayed there.”

Rolfe pointed to a set of screens in the communications center. “That will be our entertainment later. I think you’ll find it interesting. But first things first.” He gestured to a seat by a worktable in the central chamber. When Nick sat down, Rolfe perched on the table itself so that his head was higher than Lopez’s. He stared down at Nick. “Are you ready for business?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“So let’s do the status review, see where we stand.” Gordy Rolfe waved to the assortment of food and drink beside him on the table. Nick knew from experience that Rolfe himself would touch nothing. The word from Nick’s information network was that drugs and alcohol disagreed with Rolfe’s metabolism. In fact, Nick realized that he had never seen Gordy eat. The same information sources said that he was also celibate.

What were Gordy Rolfe’s pleasures? Nick had his own operating philosophy: If you want to see inside a man, you find out what he does for recreation.

Nick filed that question away for future reference. He had enough hedonistic tastes for both of them. He declined the offer of refreshment with a shake of the head.

Rolfe went on, “Let’s start with John Hyslop. Are you sure you didn’t screw up with him?”

Nick Lopez knew Gordy’s style. Deference and politeness were for the representatives of the Argos Group, not for its leader. Rolfe played rough, and he hated you to know what he would say next. This time Nick had no idea. Be casual. He said, “I’m sure I didn’t screw up. Hyslop’s an even better engineer than we thought. Leave him up there on Sky City, he’ll have the shield back on schedule before you know it. Neither of us wants that.”

“Okay, okay. Just want to be sure you’re not backing off. I did my part. I sent one of my top people, Maddy Wheatstone, up to talk Bruno Colombo into releasing Hyslop from all shield work. I told her to get Hyslop reassigned to the asteroid capture project.”

Now it was harder for Nick to be casual. “You mean it didn’t work? I thought Hyslop was taken care of. No one gave me any negative feedback.”

“I mean it worked too damn well. Maddy came to see me a few hours ago and asked me what game I was playing. She said that I had told her it would be tricky to make Colombo agree, but that I relied on her to carry out a difficult job. Now she says Colombo served Hyslop up to her on a plate almost before she could ask. I knew that had to be your doing, but of course I didn’t tell her.”

“You never met Colombo?” When Rolfe shook his head, Nick went on, “If you had, you’d understand. Bruno Colombo is big — bigger than me — and impressive. The first time you see him you think he’s really somebody. The second or third time, you see right through him. It’s not a man inside that beautiful suit; it’s a dog waiting to be kicked. I got him his job as head of Sky City, and he’d do anything to keep it. If I say, ’Shit,’ Bruno’s down there squatting before I finish speaking. All I did was hint that I’d be pleased if John Hyslop could be reassigned to help on an Argos Group project. He did the rest.”

“He doesn’t know how important Hyslop is to shield development?”

“It would make no difference. I’m telling you, Colombo’s my man.”

“I won’t stand people like that working for me. I pay for self-starters. If they don’t show independence, they’re gone.”

“You’re lucky, Gordy. The Argos Group is privately owned—”

“More than privately. It’s mine.”

“So it’s yours to do what you like with. It’s different when you’re in my position and you run a public institution like the WPF, with a hundred countries arguing about what your priorities should be. I have to have people like Bruno Colombo, men who’ll scramble to do absolutely anything I tell them. One worry I still have about John Hyslop is that he may be too independent.”

“Could be. Hyslop’s an engineer. Engineers are dangerous because they’re obsessed by facts and you can’t divert them or buy them off. But Hyslop’s working for us now, or he will be as soon as he’s wrapped up what he was doing on the shield. What about the man who’ll be taking his place on Sky City? That’s who I’m worried about.”

“It’s a woman. Stansfield; Lauren Stansfield.”

“Woman, then. What do we know about her? How do we know she won’t be as likely as Hyslop to get the shield back on schedule, or put facts and trends together and come to conclusions that we can’t tolerate? How do we know it’s a change for the better?”

“Gordy, somebody has to run engineering; it won’t run itself. And I’m not a fool. I already looked to see who Hyslop was likely to offer as his replacement. I’ll send you every Sky City background report on Lauren Stansfield. If you like, I can give you a summary right now.”

“Do it. I need to be sure you know what you’re doing.”

It wasn’t a request. It was an order, rudely delivered. Nick Lopez bit back his irritation. Gordy Rolfe had an absolute need to prove that he was the boss. That might be all very well within the Argos Group, where he had total control; but Nick had held senior government positions when Gordy Rolfe was still in diapers. Nick told himself for the hundredth time, Steady. He’s a power-mad dwarf, but we’re in this thing together. Someday, though . . .

“How much do you want to know? Lauren Stansfield is thirty-one years old. She’s from a very rich family back on Earth, but she wasn’t in line to inherit so she took technical training and became a systems engineer. Five years ago a power system installation took her out to Sky City. She stayed there, worked her way up to become top specialist on Sky City life-support systems: energy, air, water, food, she knows them better than anyone.”

“So she’s as bad as Hyslop.”

“No. She’s not as creative, and she doesn’t have the whole shield construction program in her head the way that Hyslop does. Also, she doesn’t know the inventory procedures. Remember, what we have to avoid is a single person who knows procurement for both Sky City and the shield. Hyslop does, and he might easily have compared orders and started counting. Lauren Stansfield won’t.”

“Are you sure she’s not close to somebody who works on shield construction? Someone she sleeps with, some shield specialist who might start comparing notes with her?”

“No. She has no sexual partner at the moment, either gender, and if she ever had one, it was at least four years ago.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Rolfe said mildly. Nick saw the gleam in the other’s eyes. For a man who went out of his way to emphasize oddities in his appearance, Gordy Rolfe took offense easily.

“Of course that isn’t peculiar.” Nick knew the right answer, and his voice was as casual as Rolfe’s. “It’s very convenient from our point of view that she’s a loner. She’s quiet and competent, so she won’t screw up the schedules worse than they are already. But she’s not too smart, either. She won’t make the shield a hundred and ten percent efficient, so that when the particle storm hits, nothing at all gets through to Earth. And she has never shown Hyslop’s flair for putting two and two together and making seven.”

“All right.” Rolfe turned away, as though the whole subject was suddenly no longer of interest. “For the time being we’ll go with Lauren Stansfield. If we have to make a change later, we will. Don’t bother to send me your reports on her. It’s time to talk about the other delays in shield construction. We have to find the cause of those, and we have to stop it.”

Nick followed the direction of Gordy’s glance. The level of light in the room was slowly fading and the vegetation beyond the barrier showed dark and dense. Again there was movement in ten-foot-high grasses, far out from the wall. It took a real effort to focus on Rolfe’s question.

“Gordy, I thought we agreed that the Sky City murders are just that — the act of an individual, sexually motivated. They’re causing additional schedule slippage, but that’s beyond our control.”

Rolfe’s eyes left the gathering gloom beyond the wall and came back to bore into Nick’s. “Bullshit. I used to think we were looking at a solo effort; now I wonder. Either way, we have to make sure we’re the only players in the game.”

“How can we? Suppose some other group has the same idea as ours? We can’t be the only two people on Earth who realize there’s lots of money and power to be had when the planet gets slammed.”

“And plenty being spent right now, if you can get your hands on a little of it. Enough to buy . . . anything.”

Rolfe made a little horizontal circling motion with his hand, palm down. The meaning was clear to Nick. The space shield consumed a third of the world’s industrial production. One percent of that, or even one-tenth of a percent, paid for the development of an Argos Group sanctuary like this a thousand times over. It was less clear who would be invited to share a sanctuary with Gordy Rolfe when the particle storm hit Earth. None of that was Nick’s business. He had his own if-all-else-fails plan.

“I won’t have anyone else cutting in,” Rolfe continued. “Our actions are not the only cause of the slippage. Which leaves the question, what else is there?”

“Does it matter?”

“It damn well does. Don’t be a dumb ox, Nick. If other people are playing games with the schedule, the chance goes way up that what we’re doing will be found out.”

“I don’t know who or what is responsible for the Sky City murders. But I do know this: They’re a definite distraction, and they certainly contribute to unplanned schedule delays. You and I need to be the only people pulling the strings out there.”

“Good.” Rolfe tilted his head and peered knowingly at Lopez. “So you will approve if I take steps in that area?”

“Of course.” Nick saw a glint of something — triumph? lunacy? — in the other man’s eyes. Rolfe the gnome, Gordy the evil goblin. Childhood memories of Rumpelstiltskin. “Why wouldn’t I approve?”

“I just want to be sure that the murders aren’t something you have — well, let’s say a direct and personal interest in.”

Nick had in his time been accused of everything from rape to incest, but the serial murder of teenage girls was a new one.

“I’m not doing anything on Sky City that you don’t know about. I haven’t been there for years. And I’m not having anything done on my behalf. I doubt if I could, and I doubt if you can.”

“You’re wrong. I’m going to find whoever or whatever is responsible for the killings.”

“Gordy, the WPF had a team looking into the killings for months. We got nowhere. If you try the same thing, your team will get nowhere, too.”

“No team. I have only one man at work on the problem.”

“What can he do that others can’t?”

“He has a knack for seeing things that no one else notices, and he’s efficient. He gets the job done. He also tells me that he has access to special expertise on the subject of similar killings. I’ll leave it at that.” Gordy’s smile was not a thing of beauty. “He’ll be going up to Sky City in the near future. I didn’t want your people and mine falling over each other. I’m reassured.”

“And I’m not. Does your man know that we’ve been playing games with shield schedules and delivery of goods to Sky City?”

“Of course not. Doesn’t know, and won’t know. That’s not his assignment.”

“Maybe, but I’ll quote your words. ’He has a knack for seeing things that no one else notices.’ Gordy, if this man is as good as you say, suppose that he also starts to see too much?”

“Then it will be my job to make sure that he stops seeing.”

“By then it may be too late.”

“Not for me. I’ll take care of it. I have methods.”

Was Rolfe suggesting what it sounded like? “Gordy, suppose the murders are the action of one person, the way it seems?”

“That’s fine. We’re not in law enforcement. We’ll know we don’t have business competition, and that’s all that matters. Are you going to argue with that?”

“You know my philosophy. As one of my fellow Senators said long ago, I’m opposed to any conspiracy of which I am not a part.”

“So we’re agreeing. There’s just one indispensable person in the Argos Group, and you’re looking at him. And you deliver whatever we need from the WPF. We tolerate no other players, anywhere.” Rolfe stared calmly at Nick. “End of discussion. What else is on your agenda?”

“Well, there’s Milton Glover and his Trust In Government group.”

“Old Numb Nuts. What about him?”

“That information we sold him. Are you sure it’s accurate?”

“Better than that. I’m sure it isn’t. The test-drilling reports he’s buying aren’t from anywhere on this continent. He thinks they’re of Nevada, but they came from South Africa.”

“Gordy, I talked him into paying a bundle for that data. You might have mentioned this to me.”

“So you could have done what?” Rolfe peered at Nick Lopez. “Suppose he does find out before they start digging — which I don’t think he will, because he and his millionaire buddies are all as thick as treacle. What’s he going to do, complain that the information he bought illegally was wrong?”

“He bought it on my recommendation.”

“Tell him you got tricked, too. Cry on each other’s shoulder. Remember, he gave us money when we most needed it. And their digging takes attention away from all your digging. You should be delighted with what he’s doing.”

“If they dig where we said, they’ll be lucky if they don’t drown.”

“Yeah.” Gordy laughed. “Big tragedy, eh? Death of rich idiots. End of discussion. What else?”

Nick shook his head. “Nothing.” He had a strong urge to get away from Gordy Rolfe and his underground lair. “Nothing that can’t wait until we have a better handle on John Hyslop. Will we be able to control him in his new job?”

“Yes. Maddy Wheatstone will take care of that.” “I don’t know her. What will she do?” “Maddy will do whatever she has to do. I handpicked her and I’ve watched her grow for nine years. When you meet her, remember that she’s tougher than she looks. Tougher than you, Lopez. If she had to take you down, she could do it.” Rolfe stood up from the table, grunting as he tried to level his twisted shoulders. His big head tilted back to stare at the ceiling, where the light was noticeably dimmer. When he spoke his voice was far-off and dreamy. “Take you down, Lopez, all the way. End of discussion. It’s getting dark in there, Lopez. Dark. So let’s have a little excitement, shall we? Let’s explore the habitat.”