He smiled from the screen, a humorless grin. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, Leo. It’s old paranoid Aybee, at it again. But try it on the Wolfman—he thinks more the way I do. And while he worries that, here’s one more thing for you. The equipment that protected the farm from space junk is the same type as we use on all the harvesters. Foolproof, triple-tested, infallible. If the farm can get hit, so can anything else. Nice thought, eh? Sweet dreams, you three. Think entropy.”
The screen blanked. As it did so, the system alert inside the ship’s cabin sounded its warning beep. They were close to crossover, the place where the ship rotated through 180 degrees, and they changed from acceleration to deceleration. For that thirty-second period, they needed to be strapped in.
Bey headed for the bunk, lying down again alongside Sylvia. As he did so, Leo Manx gave a gasp of irritation. “Mr. Wolf! Don’t let it do that.”
A spray syringe was creeping out of its holder above Manx and quietly positioning itself close to his neck.
Bey paused from his strapping in and checked the monitors. “Don’t worry. It’s only an anesthetic. Apparently the robodoc thinks you’re being too active.”
“But I have no wish to go to sleep, Mr. Wolf. Stop it!”
“Sorry. Can’t disobey doctor’s orders.” Bey lay back on the narrow bunk, squashed up next to Sylvia Fernald. He watched as the spray mist passed painlessly through Leo Manx’s skin and the other man fell asleep in mid-protest.
Bey liked Leo and enjoyed talking to him. But at the moment he needed time to chew on what Aybee had said. If he had been allowed one guess as to something that might correlate with the deaths in the form-change tanks, he would have picked sabotage—something in the software on the farm’s central computer complex. That fit the idea that feedback information was being tampered with or supplied incorrectly. What he would never have picked in a hundred guesses was the farm’s total energy load. In fact, he could see no way that it could be involved.
He felt fully awake. His aches and pains were unpleasant, and there was a disturbing buzzing in his ears. But he could stand that. He lay back in the bunk, ready for a long, intense session of thought. By the time he saw the anesthetic syringe at his neck it was too late.
“Hey! No. I don’t need—” Like Leo Manx, Bey fell asleep in mid-protest.
Bey had checked Sylvia’s condition and Leo Manx’s, but not his own. He believed he was doing fine. The transit ship’s computer disagreed. It knew that Wolf should have been safely asleep and resting, but it also understood that he was unlikely to obey a computer command. The machine had waited for crossover, knowing that Wolf would then have to return to his bunk. Then, satisfied once more with the physical condition of all three passengers, the computer turned to other matters. At its direction the speeding ship passed through crossover point and raced on for the second half of its journey to the Marsden Harvester.
The computer was justly proud of its performance. It encountered hardware problems so seldom that the automatic error-correcting codes were called on only a couple of times a year. Error checking and correction were completely automatic. No human realized it, but the ship’s rate of signal-error generation was less than a thousandth of that of the computers on the Marsden Harvester—and less than a millionth of the rate for the now-destroyed computer on the Sagdeyev space farm.
Chapter 14
“War is nothing more than the continuation of state policy by other means.”
“A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means to universal suicide.”
Conflict between the Inner and Outer Systems was a battle between a cat and a kestrel, between a lion and an eagle. Each could hurt the other—perhaps fatally. But neither could possess the other’s territory, or rationally want to do so. Fifty million people might annihilate twenty billion, but they could never subjugate them. No sane Cloudlander desired to live crowded into the Sun and the inner planets. And despite their enormous superiority in numbers, twenty billion could never control the sparse and infinitely dispersed inhabitants of the Cloud, constantly drifting outward, always farther from the Sun. No member of the United Space Federation could stand the cold, open space of the Cloud.
War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer. Its presence could be seen and felt—in the angry faces of people on the harvesters, in the hoarding of food supplies and metals, in the false confidence and self-righteousness of the government speeches, and in the tense warning notes that flew between the Inner and Outer Systems.
Cinnabar Baker felt it better than anyone. She was officially responsible for the operation and maintenance of the harvesters, but that position carried an additional duty as head of system security. It made Baker, the Most junior of the three people who ruled the Cloud, also the most powerful.
A couple of thousand staff members on her payroll sent back official reports from locations in the Cloud. Twice that number, scattered through the Inner System and the Halo, provided Baker’s unofficial information network. If someone sneezed on Ceres and that sneeze might mean bad news for the Cloud, Cinnabar Baker wanted to know about it.
Bey Wolf had watched the big woman in action and asked himself: What makes Cinnabar run? The easy answer was the official one. She worked enormously hard directing the harvesters, and that work gave her satisfaction. But the innermost depth of Cinnabar Baker, the invisible place where the ego is so delicate that a feather’s touch will bruise it, lay elsewhere. She loved and cherished her secret security operation. The network was her eyes and ears. She would do anything to keep it in place. Yet even that was not her secret pride. When word drifted in through the grapevine of an impending disaster at the Sagdeyev space farm, she could not compromise her sources. There might be a chain of a dozen informants involved, each with his own unreliability quotient and each with his own cover. Everyone had to be protected. No details had been available, no statement of how or when an “accident” might be expected. Cinnabar Baker had a choice: she could ignore the rumblings of her own intelligence net, or she could recall Leo Manx and the others from important work.
She had chosen to send that urgent recall message, but the news of the farm’s destruction had not yet reached her. The farmers were too reclusive a group to offer frequent messages. Silence was not significant. She had no way of knowing that they were struggling to devise a makeshift communications link from the remains of the old one.
Baker had the habit of returning to her office after the evening meal, clearing her desk, and starting in again to work as though it were the dawn of a new day. She had arrived at the Marsden Harvester only that morning, but now, at an hour when most humans were settling in for their three or four hours of sleep, she was beginning to sieve through the mass of printouts of the day’s incoming messages.