And while he was thinking all this, Beaupre Heimat was lifting the wire for himself and hurrying after the other man, fastidiously dodging the cowflops on the grass, pausing only to kick at a herdthing to make sure it would not respond.
It did not.
He caught up with Basingstoke, panting, at the very edge of the compound. The pain wires were quite visible here-for the sake of the cattle, not the prisoners-against a row of pretty hibiscus and torch flowers.
A gardenerthing was toppled motionless against a torch-flower shrub. Its hand was raised and frozen to a trowel. Heimat spat on it thoughtfully.
“The power is off, man,” Basingstoke said softly.
Said Heimat, swallowing, “You go first, Cyril. I’ll drag you back if you’re caught.”
Basingstoke laughed. “Oh, Beau, what a hero you are! Come along, we’ll do it together!”
12
JAWS
What you must remember at all times is that all things end-so Albert keeps telling me. I think he thinks it is some kind of consolation.
It’s true, though. Even the interminable trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS ended at last.
JAWS lives in a geostationary satellite, or actually it’s five satellites tumbling around each other in parasitic orbits, a few tens of thousands of kilometers over Conakry in Africa. It used to be in a different place—just about over the Galapagos islands-but then it was for a different purpose. It was called the High Pentagon then.
When we came out of orbit I wasn’t looking at it. I was looking down at the Earth, big and broad below us. Sunrise had passed the Gulf of Guinea, but the western bulge of Africa was still all dark. I took pleasure in the sight. I still think the Earth is about the prettiest planet there is. I could see sunlight hitting the tops of mountains off to the west, and that wonderfully blue Atlantic just below, and I was feeling quite affectionate toward the troublesome old place when I heard Essie cry, “Have ruined it!”
It took a moment to realize that she wasn’t talking about the planet. “Sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t looking at the screen.” She hadn’t been, either, as a matter of fact. Generally we only use the screen out of habit. When we really want a good look at something, it’s just as easy for us to use the True Love’s own external sensors direct. So I switched and saw what Essie saw.
There were a lot more than five objects in common orbit now, not even counting the flotilla of JAWS cruisers moving restlessly about in formation. People had been flocking to JAWS, and their spacecraft were in mooring orbits. There must have been a dozen of those shuttle ships, but the thing that Essie was talking about was a huge, crumpled mass of film. It took a moment to recognize it.
It had once been the main propulsive power for an interstellar photon-sailship. I had seen it once before, when it was in its glory, and then it had carried a crew of Sluggards on an exploration trip to some other star. “Why is it such a mess?” I demanded of Julio Cassata.
He gave me an irritated look. He was busy on the communications channels, and the person he was irritated with wasn’t me. It was the Watch Officer on JAWS, and there wasn’t much use in being irritated with him, or it, because it wasn’t a him. He said, “I say again, this is Major General Julio Cassata’s doppel, and I request immediate landing clearance. Effing machines,” he snarled, looking at Albert before he looked at me. Then, “You mean the sailship? But it was your damn Institute that brought it here for study. What did you think we were going to do with the sail? Keep pulling it back when the sun was pushing it out of orbit? . . . Yes, thank you,” he said to the commset, and nodded to Alicia Lo to take us in.
It wasn’t that easy.
The particular section of JAWS we were headed for was Delta, a soup can that weighed forty thousand tons. You could tell it was the command satellite. For the convenience of the high brass, or anyway the meat portions of it, it rotated more rapidly than the others. That gave them a little better up-and-down orientation for their comfort, but it wasn’t a convenience for Alicia Lo.
Still, she corkscrewed us neatly into the dock. It was a virtuoso performance, and she deserved a better audience than Essie and me. We weren’t watching her. We were looking at that shark-ship fleet of JAWS cruisers, obviously ready for action-any kind of action. I murmured, “I hope they aren’t going to do anything foolish.”
“If do anything at all,” Essie said soberly, “will be foolish. Is no nonfoolish thing to do.”
And then we were aboard the JAWS satellite.
The way people like Essie and me come aboard a spacecraft or satellite is to bridge in to the internal communications facilities; after that, we can go anywhere the cables go, and maybe a little bit beyond. On Delta-JAWS we went as far as the hatch chamber and stopped. There were no comm facilities, or at least none we were allowed to use. The Watch Officer, a machine program in the form of a callow young lieutenant, said with military courtesy but no give, “General Cassata may proceed, sirs and madams, but the rest of you must remain in the secure lounge.”
Of course, we didn’t want to do that, not at all. It wasn’t what I had come to JAWS for.
If Cassata had lingered a moment, I would have asked him to explain all this. As he hadn’t, I explained it myself. The lieutenant listened politely and then took appropriate action. He bucked it to higher authority.
Higher authority was a short, stocky woman named Mohandan Dar Havandhi. When she appeared she stared at us silently for so long that I had the sudden conviction she was a meat person, but it was only her manner. When she opened her mouth she revealed herself to be as machine-stored as the rest of it, but all she opened her mouth to say was, “No.”
“But, Commandant Havandhi,” Essie purred soothingly, “is Mr. Robinette Broadhead.”
“I am aware of that,” said the commandant.
“Then must also be aware that Mr. Robinette Broadhead is executive of Broadhead Foundation, with full clearance for all extra-solar matters.”
“That is true,” the commandant said, “but we are under Condition Red. Peacetime clearances are suspended. Of course,” she said, with a smile that showed gold teeth-how faithful some of us are to our meat originals!—“you need not be confined to the secure lounge if you prefer.”
“Well,” I said, smiling forgivingly, “in that case we’ll just—”
“You may alternatively return to your ship,” she said, and would not be budged.
Military minds! You can’t reason with them. We tried, of course. We pointed out that “security” was a laughable anachronism, Condition Red or no Condition Red, because the only enemy who might need keeping out was fifty thousand light-years away, in the kugelblitz. She didn’t bother telling us that wasn’t true, since the message had come from much nearer. She just shook her head. We tried threatening to call marshals and heads of state. She just said we certainly could do that, all right, if we wanted to, as soon as the embargo on civilian radio messages was lifted. She did not offer any guess as to when that might be. We tried to be chummy with her. We asked what all those spaceships were doing at JAWS. She didn’t answer at all; no, we weren’t going to get any military secrets out of her.
It really wasn’t as interminable as it seemed-a few thousand milliseconds at most-because Julio Cassata, or anyway his doppel, came back. Surprisingly, Cassata was looking faintly pleased. “My meat guy is in conference,” he told us, “so it will be a little while before I can, uh, see him.” He favored us with a smile-not favoring us all equally; the young woman named Alicia Lo got most of the smile. “So what would you like to do while we wait? Take a look around JAWS?”