The Shield of Time

XIV

The Zodiac in Manhattan had seemed an odd place for the Egalitarian activist organization to keep local headquarters. It was fashionable and expensive enough to be patronized by numerous elite of MS, among others. But those men had assured themselves it was not bugged! And anyone might go to the place at any hour without attracting notice; and the use of masks was common; and in such a warren of curious rooms it would not be hard to maintain a meeting place.

Koskinen followed the others down through dimness and echoes. The shield unit felt heavy on his back. At the bottom a tunnel led to an armored door that opened after Gannoway had put his face in a hood to show the scanner his retinal patterns. The room beyond was large and austere, holding little but office equipment and a conference table.

Half a dozen men waited alertly. There was nothing in their appearance to suggest the typical 3D revolutionary. Their ages seemed to run from thirty to sixty, their clothes were conservative upper-middle class, and they went through the forms of introduction in a perfectly normal manner, Thomson, Washburn, Lanphier, Brorsen, Hill, Ricoletti. But Koskinen sensed the tension that thrummed in them. There was sweat on a couple of foreheads.

“I was able to get a quorum of this directing council on such short notice because each of us has an emergency cover, a plausible reason ready to advance for suddenly going off on a trip,” Gannoway explained.

“We can’t do it too often, though,” Brorsen said sharply. “This better be for good cause tonight.”

“It is. Suppose I turn the meeting over to our guests.”

When he had finished, more than an hour later, and answered more excited questions than he wished to count, Koskinen was hoarse. He sat down and gulped the coffee offered him. Trembecki, who had said little, remained on his feet. One by one the council members ended their examination of the generator and went back to their own chairs. Cigarette smoke hazed the air.

Gannoway, at the head of the table, broke the silence. “The uses of this thing are obvious, especially after some further development work has been done,” he said. “And I’ll bet we find plenty more uses as we go along. Given material shielding against laser beams, even this little gadget is invulnerable to almost anything short of an atomic bomb; and a bigger one—! With that kind of equipment, you wouldn’t need but a small army, some thousands of men, to take over the country.”

“Wait a minute,” Trembecki said. “Pete and I haven’t yet agreed to anything. Especially not to a revolution.”

“What had you in mind?” challenged Washburn.

Trembecki outlined Abrams’s plans.

“Very pretty,” Lanphier snorted. “Now tell me something that might work.”

“Why shouldn’t this?”

“To begin with, the risk scares me spitless. Supposing you have the President’s full cooperation, and that’s a big if by itself, do you believe Hugh Marcus will sit still for that kind of treatment? Even on a strictly legal plane—and we’ve no reason to believe he’ll confine himself to that—he has his own lobby in Washington and his own propaganda machine. He can argue that the shield effect can’t be kept secret forever, any more than the atomic bomb could be, if foreigners are allowed to do research on it. Therefore, he can say, MS needs more power than before, not less.”

“He’d be arguing against public heroes, though,” Trembecki said, “the men, notably Pete, who’ve presented this design to the United States.”

“Huh! Heroes can get tarnished mighty quick.”

“Not necessarily. Remember, legitimate charges can be brought against MS, of exceeding its authority and even attempting murder.”

“To which it will be replied that Mr. Koskinen is a liar, or at least that he misunderstood the situation and panicked. That his shipmates were taken into custody to protect them from the Chinese—which is partly true, considering the fact that Captain Twain actually was murdered. That they were PI’d as an unavoidable measure, since in this emergency MS had to have total information fast.” Lanphier shrugged. “Oh, Marcus might have to sacrifice a few scrapegoats, agents he can say got too rough on their own initiative, without his knowledge. But he can keep his own skin whole, all right.”

“With the President gunning for him?”

“Yes, even then. You underestimate the hold that MS has on the public imagination. The American people have come to take it for granted that the Norris Doctrine is the only alternative to thermo-nuclear war. And the Norris Doctrine does logically require that there be an MS.”

“You see,” Gannoway put in, “no matter how well your scheme works out, it does not much alter the Protectorate. Does it, now?”

“Not overnight,” Trembecki admitted. “But under all circumstances, the United States will have exclusive possession of the shields for a number of years. Remember, an entire new concept of physics underlies the effect, based largely on extraterrestrial ideas that don’t come easily to the human mind. It’ll take quite a while for any foreign worker to duplicate, unaided by the Martians.

“So there will be a decade or better in which this country is not only supreme but safe. The fear will ease off. Reason will have a chance to operate again. You Egalitarians will be heard with respect. I think I can promise that my boss will throw his influence behind your political campaigns. And that amounts to a lot more than his personal fortune. Quite a few powerful men have a high regard for Nathan Abrams’s opinions.”

“Considering what you’ve seen and done in your own life,” Gannoway said, “I’m astonished at how high you rate human rationality.”

Trembecki’s laugh held scant humor. “I rate it lower than you, I suspect. But as for rationality per se, yes, I do have a high opinion of it, and I believe it should be encouraged whenever there’s a chance. This is such a chance. No more than that; events could go completely awry; but who was ever guaranteed anything in this life?”

The councillors looked at each other. Finally Gannoway lit a fresh cigarette, drew deeply on it, and trickled smoke between his lips as he answered:

“You’re right, any course of action is hazardous. The problem is how to minimize the hazard. As you ought to know, Jan, one way is to reduce the number of unknowns you have to deal with. Now I have a pretty fair understanding of myself and of my friends here, and you two fellows, and Nat. But I’ve never met the President, and you’re no intimate of his yourself. Nor have we met the thousands of Congressmen, bureaucrats, military officers, business and labor officials, and so on, who constitute the power structure in this country. We certainly have not met every one of a quarter billion Americans, whose hopes and fears and hates and loves and beliefs and prejudices form the general environment within which the power structure must operate. Put so many unknowns together, let them interact freely, and we can’t possibly predict what will happen. Yet that’s what you propose to do-merely hoping for the best!”

Trembecki gave him a squint-eyed stare. “You’re arguing that force is the only predictable factor,” he said.

“Yes,” Gannoway replied. “Isn’t it? If I asked a stranger to do something for me, he might or might not. But if I pulled a gun on him, I’d know damn well he would.”

“Mm, I could name you some exceptions. But let that go. Precisely how do you want us to act?”

“I can’t give you any details. We’ve had no time to think them out. But I do say we should keep the shield in our own hands, where we can know how it’s going to be used. Proceed with development work and production of improved models—”

“Wait a minute,” Koskinen objected. “That’ll take a long time. What about my shipmates?”

“There’s that,” Gannoway agreed. “Also, Nat won’t stand for his boy being kept locked away indefinitely, and he’ll have to be persuaded not to contact the President…Okay. Given a few shields of the present model—they could be turned out rather fast, couldn’t they?—we can spring our friends. Including some Equals now in MS jails, too.”

“Get them out by actual attack?” Washburn asked. He doubled a fist. “Sure, I see how. A shield unit protecting a small, armed flitter, or something like that. First we nab some MS men and PI out of them where the prisoners are being held. Then we hit.”

“When we have our improved shields,” Gannoway said, “we proceed to the next phase: the neutralization of MS.”

“By shooting up its agents and establishments?” Trembecki said.

“Sometimes. More often, though, we’d simply stand them off while we carried out other operations.”

“MS is an agency of the United States government. You’re preaching insurrection.”

“All right, I am.”

“What do you expect other agencies will do meanwhile? Will the Army stay passive? Will Congress or the President make approving noises?”

“No.”

“Or the people, even?”

“We’ll be waging an intensive propaganda campaign, of course.”

“Insufficient, when you’re bearing arms against the United States. The Constitution defines that as treason.”

“George Washington was called a traitor too, in his revolution.”

“I’m not using loaded words. I’m just pointing out that when you’ve said A you have got to say B.” Trembecki’s forefinger stabbed at the men around the table. “Come on, admit it. Your aim is and always has been the violent overthrow of the United States government.”

“So be it,” Ricoletti said fiercely. “There’s no other way.”

“That means that a paramilitary junta will seize power and rule by fiat. It also means that the lid will be taken off the world. What do you expect will happen then?”

“Nothing very alarming,” Gannoway said. “This is one problem we have studied in detail. We aren’t bearded anarchists huddling in some dank cellar, Jan. We know as much about war games, strategic analysis, and political anthropology as they do at West Point. And we’ve used such techniques for years to help us plan.

“The military garrisons abroad won’t be recalled. Even with MS gone, they’ll be able to keep control for quite some time. A large-scale revolt can’t be organized and equipped overnight, you know. Meanwhile the Equal regime will be acting—fast. That is one very real advantage a junta has over a republican government or a bureaucracy, provided it knows what it wants: speed and decisiveness. As soon as internal order has been restored, we’ll call an international conference. We already know who most of the delegates will be. We’ll present them with Quarles’s world authority scheme, get that ratified, staff the necessary organizations—then bring home the American troops, resign our own powers, and sit back to enjoy a world we’ve made fit to live in!”