“Mother,” Stirling said presently, “I have to borrow some money from you. I’m flying to Boston.”
Mason Third was about fifty years old, with twinkly-eyed good looks, graying hair and the upright carriage of a vain man who is below medium height. He stood in the center of his hotel room and read Stirling’s note for the second time.
“What makes you think I can help you, Victor?” He spoke crisply, with an almost English accent, and Stirling momentarily saw him in a World War I officer’s uniform, with direct eyes, neat mustache, Sam Brown belt. The physical presence of Mason Third had not matched Stirling’s preconceived picture in any respect, except that a cutting in his morgue file had connected him with a divorce scandal. This carefully dressed man, who barely came to Stirling’s shoulder, was the archetype of all lady-killers.
“I know you can help me,” Stirling said, sensing that a blunt approach would work best. “But what’s more important from your point of view, is that I can help you even more.”
Third glanced at his watch. “I don’t quite see that.”
“Senator, let’s not beat about the bush. People are dying on He 23, and we both have good reasons for keeping them alive. My reasons are personal; yours are political.Right now Raddall has the voters behind him; but tempers are going to die down eventually and somebody’s going to count the cost in human lives and state-owned property.
“Did you know my brother has a herbicidal bomb up there?”
“No.” Third’s eyes became watchful.
“He has___ And he’ll use it. Raddall is going to be the first Administrator to throw away one-hundred-and-fifty square miles of agricultural land almost on the eve of an election. That’s the negative side. The positive side is that you could become the senator who saved one-hundred-and-fifty square miles of agricultural land almost on the eve of an election… .”
“Never try to become a politician, Victor,” Third interrupted. “Broadswords and flick knives are incompatible weapons.”
“If you can get me back onto the lie,” Stirling said doggedly, “I can get control of that bomb, and I can get those people up there to agree to come down peacefully.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Yes.”
Two hours later, as the elevator car carried him up into the windy darkness, Stirling looked back at the trembling lights of civilization and pondered the meaning of that last affirmative. In retrospective analysis, it did not mean he was certain he could overcome Johnny, get control of the bomb, and win the villagers on to his side. All it meant was he was prepared to die in the attempt; but—Stirling looked up at the black trapezium of Heaven with something approaching reconciliation—he had just discovered that one brand of certainty was as good as another.
Chapter Seventeen
Feeling grateful that somebody had been thoughtful enough to deactivate the robotic scarecrows, Stirling picked his way across the ice-covered transit area.
He hesitated at the edge of the raised platform and pondered a leap down into the crawling darkness which—for all’ the reassurance he got from his eyes—might represent a hole cut in the He’s floor. Borges had fallen silently to an unpleasant death, Stirling thought. Air resistance prevents a man’s body from reaching any higher speed than a hundred and twenty miles an hour, which meant Borges would have had a full minute and a half to think things over on the way down.
The silhouette of a partially completed building further along the platform reminded Stirling that the F.T.A. team must have provided some means of getting down to the soil bed level. He walked along the tracks, found a ramp, and walked down it. The intense darkness was accentuated by radial sprays of light on the horizon far ahead, where government aircraft had ringed the power station with per-ma-flares. Stirling was certain Johnny was not one of the garrison; and he did not want to get close to the station anyway, in case somebody opened up on him with a rifle. He kept moving south for the better part of an hour, jumping the sunken tracks which separated each fertile strip before turning east in the direction of the village.
Once his eyes had adjusted to seeing by starlight, he found it relatively easy to keep in the center of a strip. He had been striding over the crisply furrowed soil for some time before realizing his chest no longer felt constricted, that his lungs were satisfying themselves easily and gratefully on the glacier-fresh night air. Johnny was right about me, he thought. More right than I was about him.
By taking bearings from the garishly illuminated power station, Stirling estimated he had covered about seven miles when the radio in his pocket began to bleep. He took it out and spoke his name into the grill.
“Victor,” a crisp voice said, “this is Mason Third. I’ve just had clearance from Raddall. He isn’t happy, but the Air Force is going to hold off until noon tomorrow—today, that is. You’ll need to have everything going your way by that time.”
“Don’t worry.” Stirling dropped the radio into his pocket and began to walk faster, looking around him for the familiar hulk of an agricultural robot. The villagers had too much in common with frontiersmen for him to try sneaking up on them. The only way to enter the village in safety would be on the back of a yellow dinosaur.
An hour later he found one of the big machines quietly at work turning over the black soil, unhindered and unperturbed by the darkness that sifted away to the horizons. Stirling climbed up on the moisture-beaded flanks, crossed the beam, and positioned himself on the flat upper surface of the faintly thrumming turret. When dawn began to overpaint the dimmer stars he stripped the cover from the alarm relay panel. It came away easily in his hands and was evidence that this particular robot had been ridden in the not too distant past. He closed the relay designating the eastern end of the strip; the turret pulled its spider legs clear of the soil; and the steel mammoth obediently moved off with gathering speed. Stirling kept his face turned into the wind and sucked it in greedily while he had the chance.
The robot took ten minutes to reach the edge of the village. As soon as it had rolled to a halt, Stirling leaped onto the soil bed and from there down into the margin.
Knowing his arrival would have been watched by dozens of eyes, he walked casually towards the center of the village and waited for someone to make contact. He did not have long to wait. A man and woman ran towards him from the shade of a grass-blurred tank, the woman carrying a layered bundle which must have been a baby. Her face was voodoo-patterned with tear streaks.
“Can you help us?” Her voice was brittle with fear. “Can you get us out of here? My baby …”
The man did not speak; but his eyes scanned Stirling’s face, and he kept touching the woman’s shoulder uncertainly, almost apologetically.
“Everybody can leave,” Stirling said. “The raids have been suspended till noon to give you a chance to get clear of the village. Spread the word around. Everybody is free to go.”
The man hesitated.
“What are you waiting for? I tell you it’s all over.”
“Jaycee says nobody is to leave.” The man glanced guiltily at the woman beside him. “He’s sitting on a tank down at the south end. He has that rad-rifle up there with him—and he says nobody is to leave.”
Stirling felt something heave icily in his stomach. “I’ll fix it with Jaycee. Just start spreading the word around.”
He walked on towards the south end, noting the effects of the air raids. The grass’ underfoot was matted and soggy in places where storage tanks had been ripped open by cannon fire and had spilled their contents, which was sometimes water, sometimes evil-smelling liquids. In several places he saw ragged three-foot holes in the decking, through which it was possible to glimpse sunlit oceans seemingly frozen in their westward march by sheer distance. Several times he saw brown faces watching him from the lee of heavier structural members. Each time, he waved confidently and shouted to them to get ready to leave; but they seemed afraid to move—and he had an idea they were not worrying about aircraft. He wondered if Johnny had burned anybody with the big rifle, just to show them that the king was not prepared to let his subjects walk out on him. Stirling hoped it had not come to that. Somehow, someday it could all be worked out and made right again—provided Johnny had not taken human life.