Her father leaned back in his chair. Margie was not used to seeing Godfrey Menninger looking old and tired, but that was how he looked now.
“Sweetie,” he said heavily, “do you have any idea how much trouble we’re in?”
“Of course, I do, poppa, but—”
“No, listen. I don’t think you do. There’s a tanker aground on Catalina Island today, with six hundred thousand tons of oil that isn’t going to get to Long Beach. Wouldn’t matter, normally. Southern California keeps plenty of reserves. But their reserves got diverted to your project, so they’re low now. Unless they get that tanker afloat in forty-eight hours, Los Angeles is going to spend the weekend in a brownout. What do you think is going to be the public reaction to that?”
“Well, sure, a certain amount of shit is going to—”
He raised his hand. “And you saw the story in this morning’s papers. The Peeps know their tactran satellite was deliberately destroyed.”
“No, it wasn’t! That was an accident. The bomb was just supposed to knock out the supply ship!”
“An accident in the commission of a crime becomes part of the crime, Margie.”
“But they can’t prove — I mean, there’s no way in the world that they can pin it on me unless—”
She looked at her father. He shook his head. “The Italian isn’t going to tell them anything. He’s already been taken out.”
So poor Guido was not going to live to spend his hundred thousand petrodollars. “He gave good value,” she said. “Look what you got out of his microfiches. You have proof that the Greasies set up their base where they did because they had seismic scans to show oil under it. That’s against treaty right there.”
“Don’t be a child, Margie. What does ‘proof’ have to do with it? Sir Tam and the Slopies can’t prove you handed Ghelizzi the bomb, but they don’t have to prove, they only have to know. And they do. Peru proves it. Not to mention a few other little news items you may not have heard about yet, like the American embassy in Buenos Aires being fire-bombed this morning. That’s a little message from Sir Tam or Heir-of-Mao, I would judge. What do you suppose the next message is going to be?”
Margie realized she had been scratching her blisters and made herself take her hand away. “Oh, shit,” she said glumly, and thought hard while her father waited.
But really, she reflected, the basic rules were unchanged. The equation of power was utterly clear. No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. Worse than that. Even the tiniest nation had a minute sliver of muscle of its own, gift of the breeder reactors and the waste reclaimers. Not enough to matter in a global sense, no. But Peru could enforce its decisions if driven to. Ecuador could kill Washington or Miami, Denmark could destroy Glasgow, Indonesia could obliterate Melbourne. Fire-bombings and riots — well, what did they matter? There was a permanent simmer of border incidents and small-scale violence. Each year, a few thousand injured, a few scores or hundreds dead. But the lid never blew off, because everybody knew what would happen.
“Poppa,” she said, “you know nobody can do anything really serious. The balance of power prohibits it.”
“Wrong! The balance of power breaks down as soon as somebody makes a mistake. The Peeps made one when they fired rockets at our gasbags on Klong. I made one when I let you carry that bomb to Belgrade. It’s time to pull the fuses, honey.”
For the first time in her adult life, Margie Menninger felt real fear. “Poppa! Are you saying you’re not going to help me with Lenz?”
“I’m saying more than that, Margie. I agree with him. I’m seeing the President tomorrow, and I’m going to tell him to scrap the launch.”
“Poppa!”
He hesitated. “Honey, maybe later. After things quiet down—”
“Later’s no good! You think the Peeps aren’t going to reinforce as soon as they can get another satellite up there? And the Greasies? And—”
“It’s settled, Margie. ”
She looked at him, appalled. This was the God Menninger that his whole agency knew and she had rarely seen. It wasn’t her father she was looking at. It was a human being as implacable and determined as she herself had ever been, and with the accustomed support of a great deal of power to back his decisions up.
She said, “I can’t change your mind.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t give it an answer. “Well,” she said, “there’s no reason for me to hang around here then, is there? Good-bye, poppa. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you another time.”
She did not look at him again as she got up, collected her brown leather officer’s bag and her uniform cap, and let herself out.
If her father was as determined as she, the other side of the coin was that she was no less determined than he. She stopped in the visitors’ lounge and entered a public phone booth to dial a local number.
The woman on the other end was a strikingly handsome human being, not a sex symbol but a work of art. “Why, Marjorie,” she said. “I thought you were off doing spy stuff for your father or something — Marjorie! What’s the matter with your face?”
Marge felt her blotched chin. “Oh, that. That’s just a reaction to some shots. Can I come over to see you?”
“Of course, lover. Right now?”
“Right this second, mom.” Margie hung up the phone and hurried toward the elevators. But before she entered them she stopped in a ladies’ room to check her makeup.
Marge Menninger’s mother lived, among other places, in the residential tower section of one of New York City’s tallest and most expensive skyscrapers. It was an old-fashioned place, built when energy was cheap, so that it made economic sense at that time to economize on insulation and rely on huge inputs of BTUs all winter long and continuous air conditioning all summer. It was one of the few that had not been at least partly rebuilt when oil reached P$300 a barrel, and it would have been ruinously expensive for most tenants — even most well-to-do tenants. The condominium apartments were no more expensive to buy than any others in a good neighborhood. But if you had to ask what the maintenance costs would be, you couldn’t afford them. Alicia Howe and her present husband didn’t have to ask.
The butler welcomed Margie. “How nice to see you, Miss Menninger! Will you be using your room this time?”
“Afraid not, Harvey. I just want to talk to mom.”
“Yes, Miss Margie. She’s expecting you.”
As Alicia Howe rose to be kissed, she made a quick, all-seeing inventory of her daughter. Those awful splotches on her complexion! The clothes were passable enough, as army uniforms went, and thank heaven the child had been born with her father’s smiling good looks. “You could lose a couple of kilos, lover,” she said.
“I will, I promise. Mom, I want you to do me a favor.”
“Of course, hon.”
“Poppa’s being a little difficult about something, and I need to go public. I want to hold a news conference.”
Alicia Howe’s husband owned a lot of television: three major-city outlets and large interests in a dozen satellite networks. “I’m sure one of Harold’s people can help you out,” she said slowly. “Should I ask what the problem is?”
“Mom, you shouldn’t even know there’s a problem.”
Her mother sighed. She had learned to live with God Menninger’s off-the-record life while they were married, but since the divorce she had hoped to be free of it. She never talked to her ex-husband. It wasn’t that she disliked him — in her heart, she still thought him the most interesting, and by a long way the sexiest, of her men. But she could not cope with the knowledge that any little slip of the tongue from him to her, and from her to anyone, might bring catastrophic consequences to the world.