She wanted to change the subject as much as he did.
He asked, “How is she? Is she coming here?”
“No. Not well. Homesick. For Pretoria. Can’t go because of Black riots, possibly Pacov.”
“Tell her to stay put. Ponape’s dull but safe. No Pacov and nobody nicer than the Ponapeans.” He could feel the tightness ebbing away.
Something bothered him: he sensed a false note in his last utterance, a mistake, a lie, a falsehood. What had he said? It took him a moment to remember.
There was Pacov on Ponape! Lessing’s own stash was there, wrapped in tough plastic and buried in a steel ammo box beneath a floorboard in the bungalow Mulder had given him. Would he ever be free of the curse of Marvelous Gap?
Liese was frowning, two lines of concern drawn down between her brows. He sighed, smiled, and said, “Nothing. Just a thought.”
She took him to mean their own unresolved situation. “Never mind,” she said. “You come back, we’ll see.” She rose, smoothed down her shimmery, blue dress, and stretched. That almost changed his mind, almost undid him completely.
“Okay. Later.” He peered at the TV screens again. Section twenty-two was quiet. There was no sign of the distraught youth who had precipitated Lessing’s crisis. Abner Hand was visible there, talking with three of his cronies. He was Lessing’s pupil, a good pupil — too good: he was tough, street-smart, clever with weapons, quick with slogans and speeches, educated, and likable. He had become Bill Goddard’s disciple, a member of the Unientreue faction growing within the Party. Abner Hand would make a fine storm trooper.
Lessing reached over to shut off the modem, forgotten in the strain of the past few minutes. As he did so, he caught sight of another familiar face in the TV screen, a long, lugubrious, liver-spotted face with a drooping lump of a nose and smudges like dirty fingerprints under the eyes.
It was Richmond, the Zionist kikibird who had almost unzipped him in Paris!
What was Richmond doing here? Aside from security reasons, Lessing owed the old bastard something in memory of a skinny Banger girl who had almost become an unwilling star on the Torturers’ Happy Hour Show!
He fumbled for the public address microphone, found it, got it upside down, righted it, and somehow switched it on “Abner,” he called, “Abner Hand! Ten, nine, please. Ten, nine, please.” That was the signal to contact security control.
On the screen Abner glanced up, then around for the nearest telephone. Richmond could be seen just behind the youth’s left shoulder. The agent grinned — knowingly, Lessing would have sworn — into the camera. He looked Hand up and down as though admiring his uniform. Then he turned and strolled away.
Three long minutes elapsed before Abner’s excited voice crackled over the security-control telephone. It took Lessing another minute to describe Richmond and then still more time to gather a squad to look for him.
By that time the kikibird was gone. No one saw him again during the rest of the Congress.
The snake and the mongoose halted when they reached the top of the world, which lies somewhere north of High Kashmir and somewhere south of Cathay. The snake coiled himself upon a stone and looked north to where Mount Kailas glittered like a temple of silver and ivory in the distance. “Let us rest here for a time.” the snake said.
“Still we have half the journey to go,” grumbled the mongoose, huddling himself into his dun-colored furs.
“Do not fear, we shall reach our goal,” his companion replied. “We have covered half the distance, traversed deserts and jungles, fought demons, slain tigers, and slipped unseen through the cities of men. I shall not fail.”
Again, the mongoose snorted in derision. Mount Kailas was too far, too remote, too high, too aloof from this world. The snake had neither hands nor feet. How would he climb Lord Siva’s mountain?
The snake smiled to himself, got up, and wriggled onward.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thursday, September 17, 2043
“There it is!” exclaimed Wrench through a mouthful of hot dog.
He pointed with a napkin-stuffed fist and strove to swallow.
Lessing looked. The Party’s big, black D-170, a descendant of the C-130 military cargo planes of the previous century, was visible taxiing along the rain-misted runway. He grunted something in reply but had no idea what he said.
Jameela was aboard that plane.
Holms and Mallon shuffled their feet behind him, and Lessing turned to leave. It would take them a good five minutes to get down from the observation deck to the customs and baggage areas. Los Angeles International Airport had grown beyond all reasonable limits; like waves against a shore, it continued to nibble away at the ticky-tacky, stucco suburbs around it.
They clattered past people standing on the down escalators, tramped along the sleek, modernistic corridors, and pushed through crowds that were starting to look less like shell-shocked refugees in the midst of an army of occupation and more like ordinary folks again, people going about their business in a rational world. The worst had happened; yet even the worst was survivable. The human race hadn’t gone back to caves and spears. Civilization had more poop than the doom-sayers gave it credit for.
Los Angeles was outwardly untouched. The Cuban who was supposed to drop the water-soluble cannister of white, crystalline Starak into the aqueducts had realized suicide was for suckers and turned himself in instead. The lives of millions had hung upon that one moment of decision, and this time Death had lost the throw. Temporarily, anyhow.
Military personnel, mostly Blacks, thronged the baggage terminal. Some were returning home from overseas; others were headed out to Central America or other destinations. President Outram’s carefully unannounced policy was to separate the military along racial lines: move Blacks to certain world areas, Latins to others, and either bring Whites home or else concentrate them in still different locations. This was no easy task, even with the Pentagon, the Congress, and the media gone. The logistics were horrendous, and a hundred years of social momentum in the opposite direction had to be halted and reversed.
It was also growing more difficult to avoid confrontations with the liberals and the minorities. These were now fully aware of the monster in their midst, and every voice on the center and left of the political spectrum was in full cry, yelping for Outram’s walrus-mus- tachioed head. Huge riots had broken out in the refugee camps near Starak-ravaged Detroit; smaller ones bloomed like sudden shell-bursts here and there across the land, and more trouble — possibly civil war — loomed just over the horizon. A dozen of Lessing’s pupils had been killed in Terre Haute, Indiana, another three in Denver, Colorado, and a busload of Party organizers on a back road in Utah. The opposition was gathering in California: some in San Francisco, but most virulent in Los Angeles. They were the liberals, the Jews, the Blacks, the Latins, the gays, the Bangers, various Christian sects, and a lot of average people who put their trust in the media. Under normal circumstances the liberal-dominated media could have easily broken Outram’s “racist, fascist grab for power,” but Starak had done to the American Establishment what a size-13 boot does to an anthill. The ants still hadn’t got their act back together, and Outram had been faster to recover. He declared martial law, enlisted allies to help with emergency legislation to make everything legal, and put the Starak-contaminated cities off limits. This kept the great corporations and the media from regaining their headquarters and their control. With millions dead, the world’s business lay in chaos; Outram forestalled a return to “normalcy” by freezing the whole works “until legal ownership could be established.” Time was what he needed, time before the opposition could marshal its forces. Sequestering nearly everything of value gave him this time. It also turned up such irregularities as secret foreign ownership, interlocking directorates, hidden cartels, dummy companies, and “unwashable” cash. Starak had also done humanity a favor by stepping on the spider-kings of organized crime; their paper webs lay open to the light of day, and it was imperative to sweep them out before the “rightful heirs” could reclaim them. It was an exciting time for the federal inspectors in their bulky N.B.C. suits, wandering at will through the deserted boardrooms and corporate palaces of the poisoned cities.