It was almost two in the morning before Stirling heard footsteps in the access corridor.
He pressed himself back into the shadows of a doorway and held his press card ready in one hand. The steps drew nearer, and Stirling risked a glance along the corridor. A glowtube in the low ceiling showed Bennett zigzagging towards his apartment between two Japanese girls, who had their arms around his waist and who apparently were working hard to support him. The cold tube-light picked out the silver streaks in Bennett’s hair. His face was flushed, ecstatic; and the girls were giggling every time a new loss of balance crushed one or the other of them against the closely spaced walls. They were surrounded with pastel clouds of visi-perfume, and their heels gave off flashes of colored light at the impact of every step. A fine pair of professional glowworms. Stirling thought irrelevantly. He waited until the group was almost level with him, then stepped out, waving his card briefly.
“All right, girls,” he snapped. “I’ll want your names in a minute. Now stand away from that man.”
As he had expected, the two hustlers fled instantly, their rapid steps throwing showers of chemiluminescence from their shoes as though they were drawing power from the floor. Bennett blinked drunkenly after them for a moment; then his eyes focused on Stirling’s face and became opaque with rage and disbelief.
“You.” he gasped. “You!”
“That’s right—Johnny Considine’s brother. I’ve got a proposition for you, Bennett.”
Stirling spoke quickly in an effort to avoid the violence he could see building up in the other man’s hard-packed shoulders; but the words were useless. Bennett drove forward, both fists swinging, all traces of his drunkenness apparently gone. Stirling had a small fraction of a second to note, with relief, that Bennett was making the mistake of assuming that a surface layer of fat meant there could be no muscle underneath. He risked a gambit and allowed his 230-pound frame to absorb a couple of vicious blows from Bennett while he maneuvered for the chance to use his right. The gambit came close to being a disaster, for the punches were delivered with professional brutality and really hurt; but Bennett was not taking the trouble to defend himself. Seeing the opening, Stirling launched a single, massive right, whose lineage could have been traced back to the lead-gloved deathblows of the Roman arena. Bennett’s toughness and experience could not prevent him from being lifted off his feet, doubled around the fist, and dropped on his back several yards along the corridor. He skidded a short distance on the smooth plastic and lay still, making wet, clicking sounds in his throat as he struggled for air.
Concealing a certain amount of awe at his own capabilities, Stirling lit a cigarette and stood staring down at Bennett through a mask of smoke.
“Next time …” Bennett’s eyes slitted with pain. “Next time … you won’t be . . .so lucky.”
Stirling looked unimpressed. “There isn’t going to be a next time, Bennett. I’m a reporter with the Record and you smell like headline material to me. Could your business stand the publicity?”
“What business?”
“Your export business, of course.” Stirling glanced upwards, significantly. “Perhaps I shouldn’t refer to it as exporting, though. You elevate things, don’t you. Things and … people.” “You’re crazy.”
“All right, Bennett. You can crawl into that highly expensive apartment of yours and wait for tomorrow’s Record. You’ll read about yourself.” Stirling walked away, wondering if Bennett would know enough about newspaper ethics to realize that no editor would go to press with the scanty information he had.
“Hold on a minute,” Bennett said desperately. “You were talking about a proposition.”
Stirling turned, went back, and helped the smaller man to his feet. In spite of his exultation he could feel an uneasy tightening in his lungs—as though they were already struggling with the cold, thin air of Heaven.
Chapter Four
The terminal station for International Land Extension, U. S. 23, was an artificial island mounted on stilts ten miles off the coast. Three miles above its storage sheds, receiving bays, and administrative area was the western edge of the He, which was a rectangular raft measuring ten by fifteen miles. In the center of the island was a bank of six freight elevators which ferried supplies up to the lie and brought back its produce for shipment to the shore. Each elevator was a simple platform structure fitted with negative-gravity units, automatic docking equipment, and remote guidance facilities which enabled it to be operated from a glass-roofed control block.
Stirling had been on the island once before, with a party of journalists on one of the infrequent press visits organized by the East Coast Government; but now he saw it through new eyes.
At the start of the ten-minute skimmer ride out from Newburyport, the island was a slate-blue hump on the horizon, no different from the other irregularities marking the chain of Food Tech processing stations which skirted most of the coast. It was a crisply sunny afternoon with a fresh westerly breeze, which drove the black-looking water along in neat, regular waves. The processing stations, which could be seen to the north and south, were rimmed with lines of white foam as sharp as the finest brush strokes on an Oriental vase. Stirling picked out a number of the freight skimmers busily shuttling loads of the fish protein, marine protozoa, and sea greens which nourished most of the population. Beyond the line of stations, he saw one of the giant trawlers drifting in as it impassively herded shoals, armies, whole deep-sea kingdoms of fish in its invisible magnetic nets.
Living on shore, Stirling realized, it was easy to forget the awesome scale of the Food Technology Authority’s operations, or the simple fact that it stood between the people of the United States and decimation by famine. Looked at in that light, Gordon Hodder and the other members of the F.T.A. hierarchy could almost be forgiven for creating a political machine and systematically filling key governmental posts with their own men. There even were arguments in favor of this from the constitutional point of view. Many political theorists had pointed out that, since the U.S. had been virtually divided by the dust into two separate countries, each with its own administrative setup, the F.T.A. was the one, big, unifying force that remained. The nominally Democratic East Coast Government and the Republican West seemed to be drifting further and further apart, creating a political climate in which Hodder might become the first real President the country had seen in nearly a century.
Stirling was not a political animal; but the idea of a country’s ruler having absolute control over its food supplies had negative appeal for him. His objection was so ingrained that he had never felt it necessary to express it in less basic terms.
As the processing stations fell behind, the island ahead began to bulk larger on the horizon. While he watched, a black mote detached itself from the upper surface and began the long climb to Heaven. It brought home to Stirling the enormity of what he was setting out to do. The He was a huge, misty trapezium filling most of the eastern sky. Wisps of cloud streamed beneath it—obscuring much of the fine detail of its underside—but at this range he could see the protuberance of the centrally positioned power plant. Smaller booster units dotted the structure in a regular pattern—propagating the field which shielded it from the lethal yearnings of gravitation—and between them ran intricate webworks of lattice girders and secondary beams.
Why, Stirling wondered numbly, why would anyone want to leave the ground and live up there? Green fields and fresh food there might be—but a man would be exposed, with a naked sky above, and fifteen thousand feet of wind\ darkness yawning below his bed while he slept. The idea was … unthinkable. Suddenly Stirling did not want to go and was unable to produce any reason for going. There was no longer any mystery about Johnny’s fate: Bennett had confirmed that he had bought a one-way trip to the He. His mother had been hit harder by the disappearance than her despair-molded nature would let her admit; but what would be solved by dragging Johnny back by the seat of his pants? And if he, Stirling, was being motivated by a belated need to play the role of a protective big brother, was there not some less traumatic gesture he could make to the memory of the flushed, defenseless face that had shared his boyhood pillow?