Lomax brought himself under control with an obvious effort. “I’ve given orders for you and the rest of those thugs to be brought back to this building right away, Stirling. We’ll see how insolent you can be in prison—if you can get back in one piece.”
Stirling shrugged. “Tell your boys to hurry over. It would be best from our point of view if your gunners were doing their party piece when the first spectators arrive. Even a helicopter could get out here from the coast in less than five minutes; so they should be overhead any time now.” He nodded at Theodore, who broke the connection, and Lomax’s image went on a comet-ride into the spurious depths of the screen.
“Good stuff,” Johnny said. “I think I’ll appoint you my permanent press officer.”
“It was good stuff, all right.” Stirling could feel his elation begin to ebb. “I only hope Theodore had the set pushing it all out.”
There was a movement at the hatch above their heads, and Dix called them up onto the roof. Stirling climbed up into the sunlight behind Johnny and peered towards the west to the spot where Dix was pointing. A flotilla of F.T.A. sleds, rising and falling in flight, was coursing above the soil beds towards the station; but Stirling’s gaze centered itself higher up.
Above the rim of the lie, the crystal carapaces of three bubblecraft were glittering against the pale blue sky.
Johnny’s next move filled Stirling with an even deeper sense of unease. He manhandled the rad-rifle down off the roof and used it to burn through the locks on the station’s output master-switches. When the job was finished, Johnny had in his hands the power to drop International Land Extension, U.S. 23, into the North Atlantic if he so desired.
Apart from not liking the implications of what Johnny was doing, Stirling was worried about what might happen if the rifle slipped at the wrong moment and burned through vital circuitry in another part of the station. He took his mind off it by sitting at the communications set and searching the wavebands to see how the various news-services were handling the story. The reaction had been almost immediate. On seeing the bubblecraft overhead, the F.T.A. sleds had scampered back to headquarters to wait while Lomax assessed the new situation. And, in spite of the fact that it was illegal to overfly an lie, the sky had been filled with assorted sizes and types of craft all morning—until the arrival of a squadron of army drift-ships had cleared the air. Even then, an occasional bubble filled with newsmen and photographers had been skimming in over the wall for a quick pass across the He. Watching the newscasts on the main screen, Stirling had felt a slight sense of dislocation at sitting inside the power station, yet seeing it from the machines passing above. Each time one of the machines passed by, the villagers manning the two guns remaining on the roof waved like excited children.
At first there had been some confusion in the news-stories: many stations had given the impression that the F.T.A. had sent men onto the He simply to clear out newly discovered squatters. But Johnny’s statement about the destruction of crops had burned in deep, and aerial shots of the building-work-in-progress on the strips had begun to occupy most of the transmission time. Within two hours the major stations were using their political specialists on the story; and reports began to come in of Gordon Hodder, President of the F.T.A., and Lester B. Raddall, the East Coast Administrator, not being available for comment.
Stirling nodded in satisfaction—Hodder’s propaganda machine was going to be faced with an impossible task trying to erase this incident from the public memory before the elections. Dealing the F.T.A. a body blow had been almost too easy, Stirling thought, but what was going to happen next? Johnny was relaxed and confident, seemingly under the impression that Lomax had been his last enemy. He had already sent the F.T.A. man a message that any further attempts to retake the power station would result in the lift energy for the whole western sector of the He being shut off at its source. Stirling was satisfied the threat would be effective against Lomax, but it would take more than that to restrain the entire F.T.A. and the Government. If necessary, either one of them could— given a little time—set up ground-based equipment which would support the He long enough for a military action to be carried out against the villagers.
Late in the afternoon the communications set suddenly refused to pick up anything but audio and visual noise; and Stirling guessed Lomax, or someone higher up the pyramid, had given orders for the power station to be screened off. Johnny was unimpressed when told about it.
“When anybody who matters wants to get through to us, he will. Don’t forget, they haven’t heard my terms yet.” He bit off a piece of wheat cake, washed it down with a gulp of water, and leaned back against the parapet of the machine-gun nest. Dix laughed near at hand, but kept his eyes on the distant shapes of the drift-ships patrolling beyond the He’s perimeter.
“All right, Johnny,” Stirling said patiently. “I keep on underestimating you; so I’m not going to point out the impossibility of fighting Hodder and Raddall. You must know that already. Just tell me what terms you can hope for.”
“Hope for, big brother? I’m not hoping for anything. I told you, I’m laying down the terms.” Johnny kept watching the eastern horizon as he spoke; and, following his gaze, Stirling saw the yellow outline of a robot approaching at top speed. It was too far away for him to see who was riding it.
“But think ahead, Johnny. You surely can’t …” “For Christ’s sake!” Johnny flowed upright and turned his back on Stirling, “Do you ever get tired listening to yourself, Vic? You make such a profession out of sounding reasonable, and yet the things you say … Think ahead, you said. You want to talk about thinking ahead? You’re good at that, are you?”
“Your ‘rhetorical question’ sign has just lit up, Johnny.” “Well, let’s see how good you really are. Some of the people who came to the He to live brought guns with them, just la case they would be needed. Old man Latham brought his library. How about you, Vic. Supposing you had planned to stay on the He permanently, what would you have brought? What’s the one thing you could have packed which would make it impossible for anybody in the whole world to order you back down?”
Stirling hesitated, unable to force his brain into action.
“I’ll give you a few hints, Vic. The thing I brought weighs about ten pounds; it’s metal; and it’s filled with a micro-powder called …” He waited, smiling.
“Herbicide,” Stirling blurted out. “Paraquat dichlorideD!”
“Good boy,” Johnny said with mock indulgence. “Isn’t he a good boy, Dix?”
Stirling was too occupied with his own thoughts to note Dix’s reaction. Johnny was unbalanced, of course; but it was possible to have too much equilibrium, to have a mind that was stable to the point of being static. Johnny’s father, from whom he had inherited the ancient World-War-II flying boots, had been an antique aircraft enthusiast; and Stirling suddenly remembered him saying that the best fighting planes were slightly unstable.
And Johnny had piloted the slightly distorted, out-of-true craft of his mind with the lonely brilliance of an ace. The whole point about Heaven was that, in the eyes of the average American, the soil was sacred. That was the primitive psychology underlying the nation’s acceptance of the fantastic cost of the air-borne islands in spite of their relatively insignificant output. They represented the cherished fecundity without which no organism can have a stake in the future, and to threaten even one of them with sterility was to wield a dark power against which little could stand. One herbicidal bomb exploded inside the He’s shell field would render it meaningless, valueless, infertile.