“Not too fantastic,” Lazarus disagreed, “if you are willing to use your emergency powers to the limit at the last minute.”
“Possibly. But we can’t wait four days.” “Why not?’
“The situation won’t hold together that long.”
“Neither will mine,” put in Barstow.
Lazarus looked from one to the other. “Huh? What’s the trouble? What’s up?”
They explained:
Ford and Barstow were engaged in a preposterously improbable task, that of putting over a complex and subtle fraud; a triple fraud with a different face for the Families, for the public, and for the Federation Council. Each aspect presented unique and apparently insurmountable difficulties.
Ford had no one whom he dared take into his confidence, for even his most trusted personal staff member might be infected with the mania of the delusional Fountain of Youth … or might not be, but there was no way to know without compromising the conspiracy. Despite this, he had to convince the Council that the measures he was taking were the best for achieving the Council’s purpose.
Besides that, he had to hand out daily news releases to convince the citizens that their government was just about to gain for them the “secret” of living forever. Each day the statements had to be more detailed, the lies more tricky. The people were getting restless at the delay; they were sloughing off the coat of civilization, becoming mob.
The Council was feeling the pressure of the people. Twice Ford had been forced to a vote of confidence; the second he had won by only two votes. “I won’t win another one-we’ve got to move.”
Barstow’s troubles were different but just as sticky. He had to have confederates, because his job was to prepare all the hundred thousand members for the exodus. They had to know, before the time came to embark, if they were to leave quietly and quickly. Nevertheless he did not dare tell them the truth too soon because among so many people there were bound to be some who were stupid and stubborn … and it required just one fool to wreck the scheme by spilling it to the proctors guarding them.
Instead he was forced to try to find leaders who he could trust, convince them, and depend on them to convince others. He needed almost a thousand dependable “herdsmen” to be sure of getting his people to follow him when the time came. Yet the very number of confederates he needed was so great as to make certain that somebody would prove weak.
Worse than that, he needed other confederates for a still touchier purpose. Ford and he had agreed on a scheme, weak at best, for gaining time. They were doling out the techniques used by the Families in delaying the symptoms of senility under the pretense that the sum total of these techniques was the “secret.” To put over this fraud Barstow had to have the help of the biochemists, gland therapists, specialists in symbiotics and in metabolism, and other experts among the Families, and these in turn had to be prepared for police interrogation by the Families’ most skilled psychotechnicians … because they had to be able to put over the fraud even under the influence of babble drugs. The hypnotic false indoctrination required for this was enormously more complex than that necessary for a simple block against talking. Thus far the swindle had worked … fairly well. But the discrepancies became more hard to explain each day.
Barstow could not keep these matters juggled much longer. The great mass of the Families, necessarily kept in ignorance, were getting out of hand even faster than the public outside. They were rightfully angry at what had been done to them; they expected anyone in authority to do something about it-and do it now!
Barstow’s influence over his kin was melting away as fast as that of Ford over the Council.
“It can’t be four days,” repeated Ford. “More like twelve hours … twenty-four at the outside. The Council meets again tomorrow afternoon.”
Barstow looked worried. “I’m not sure I can prepare them in so short a time. I may have trouble getting them aboard.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ford snapped.
“Why not?”
“Because,” Ford said bluntly, “any who stay behind will be dead-if they’re lucky.”
Barstow said nothing and looked away. It was the first time that either one of them had admitted explicitly that this was no relatively harmless piece of political chicanery but a desperate and nearly hopeless attempt to avoid a massacre and that Ford himself was on both sides of the fence.
“Well,” Lazarus broke in briskly, “now that you boys have settled that, let’s get on with it. I can ground the Chili in-” He stopped and estimated quickly where she would be in orbit, how long it would take him to rendezvous. “-well, by twenty-two Greenwich. Add an hour to play safe. How about seventeen o’clock Oklahoma time tomorrow afternoon? That’s today, actually.”
The other two seemed relieved. “Good enough,” agreed Barstow. “I’ll have them in the best shape I can manage.”
“All right,” agreed Ford, “if that’s the fastest it can be done.” He thought for a moment. “Barstow, I’ll withdraw at once all proctors and government personnel now inside the reservation barrier and shut you off. Once the gate contracts, you can tell them all.”
“Right. I’ll do my best.”
“Anything else before we clear?” asked Lazarus. “Oh, yes-Zack, we’d better pick a place for me to land, or I may shorten a lot of lives with my blast.”
“Uh, yes. Make your approach from the west. I’ll rig a standard berth marker. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Not okay,” denied Ford. “We’ll have to give him a pilot beam to come in on.”
“Nonsense,” objected Lazarus. “I could set her down on top of the Washington Monument.”
“Not this time, you couldn’t. Don’t be surprised at the weather.”
As Lazarus approached his rendezvous with the Chili he signaled from the gig; the Chili’s transponder echoed, to his relief-he had little faith in gear he had not personally overhauled and a long search for the Chili at this point would have been disastrous.
He figured the relative vector, gunned the gig, flipped, and gunned to brake-homed-in three minutes off estimate, feeling smug. He cradled the gig, hurried inside, and took her down.
Entering the stratosphere and circling two-thirds of the globe took no longer than he had estimated. He used part of the hour’s leeway he had allowed himself by being very stingy in his maneuvers in order to spare the worn, obsolescent injection meters. Then he was down in the troposphere and making his approach, with skin temperatures high but not dangerously so. Presently he realized what Ford had meant about the weather. Oklahoma and half of Texas were covered with deep, thick clouds. Lazarus was amazed and somehow pleased; it reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to harness the elements. He hoped that their planet-if they found one!-would have some nice, lively weather.
Then he was down in it and too busy to meditate. In spite of her size the freighter bucked and complained. Whew! Ford must have ordered this little charivari the minute the time was set-and, at that, the integrators must have had a big low-pressure area close at hand to build on.
Somewhere a pattern controlman was shouting at him; he switched it off and gave all his attention to his approach radar and the ghostly images in the infra-red rectifier while comparing what they told him with his inertial tracker. The ship passed over a miles-wide scar on the landscape-the ruins of the Okla-Orleans Road City. When Lazarus had last seen it, it had been noisy with life. Of all the mechanical monstrosities the human race had saddled themselves with, he mused, those dinosaurs easily took first prize.