Michaelmas (18 page)

She smiled with a touch of the wistful. "Thank you. It's a day-to-day thing, however, isn't it? You can't remain still if you wish to advance."

He smiled. "No. No, of course not. But you seem well situated. A very bright star in a rapidly growing organiza-tion, and now in one day you have credits with me and with a rising personality, both on a major story ..."

"Yes, he is rising overnight," Clementine said, uncon-sciously jerking her head toward the back of the plane. "Not a Campion but a mushroom," she said in French.

Michaelmas smiled. Then he giggled. He found he could not control it. Little tears came to his eyes. Domino said, "Stop that! Good heavens!"

Clementine was staring at him, her hand masking her mouth, her own shoulders shaking.

"Incredible! You look like the little boy when the schoolmaster trips."

He still could not bring himself to a halt. "But you, my dear, are the one Who soaped the steps."

They laughed together, as decorously as possible, until they had both run down and sat gasping. It was incredible how relieved Michaelmas felt. He was completely uncon-cerned that people up the aisle were staring at them, or that Luis, the camera operator, sat beside Clementine stiffly looking out the window like a gentleman diner over-hearing a jest between waiters.

Finally, Clementine dabbed under her eyes with the tips of her fingers and began delving into her purse. She said: "Ah. Ah, Laurent, nevertheless," more soberly now, "this afternoon there's been something I could have stopped. You'll see it tonight and say, 'Here something was done that she could surely have interrupted, if she weren't so professional.' " She opened her compact and touched her cheeks with a powder pad. She looked up and sideward at Michaelmas. "But it is not professional of me to say so. We have shocked Luis."

The camera operator's lip twitched. He continued to stare out his window with his jaw in his palm. "I do not listen to private conversations," he said correctly. "Especially not about quick-witted people who instruct in technique to something they call 'crew'."

Michaelmas grinned.
"Viva
Luis," he said softly. He put his hand on Clementine's wrist and said: "Whatever was done — do you think it serves the truth?"

"Oh, the truth, yes," Clementine said.

"She means it," Domino said. "She's a little elevated, but simple outrage would account for that. There's no stab of guilt."

"Yes, her pulse didn't change," Michaelmas said to him, bending over Clementine's hand to make his farewell. He said to her: "Ah, well, then, whatever else there is, is bearable. I had best sit down somewhere now." Campion would be back down here in a minute, ready to discuss what was to be done as soon as they landed.
"Au revoir"

"Certainement."

"Daugerd checked his phone early," Domino said. "It's a terrible day for fishing; pouring rain.

He's returned Han-rassy's call; she had something that needs his professional appraisal. He's running his bass boat down to the Bagnell Dam town landing to meet that plane of hers. Bass boats are fast. His ETA at her property will be something like seven-forty her time — about half an hour after you de-plane at Cité d'Afrique."

Michaelmas touched his lips to the back of Clementine's hand, feeling the fragility of the bones, and moved up the aisle. Campion watched him warily.

"Sincere, you say," Michaelmas said to Domino as he dropped into a seat. "Norwood."

"Absolutely. I wish I had that man's conscience."

"Do you suppose," Michaelmas ventured, "that something is bringing in people from a parallel world? Eh?" He stared out the window, his jaw in his palm, as the coast slid below them. The Mediterranean was not blue but green like any other water, and the margins of the coast were so rumpled into yellow shallows and bars that on this surfless day it was almost impossible to decide whether they would fall on land or water. "You know the theory? Every world event pro-duces alternative outcomes? There is a world in which John Wilkes Booth missed and Andrew Johnson was never President, so there was much less early clamour for threaten-ing Nixon with impeachment? So he didn't name Jerry Ford, but someone else, instead? The point being that Lincoln never knew he was dead, and Ford never dreamed he'd been President.

"I know that concept," Domino said shortly. "It's sheer anthropomorphism."

"Hmm. I suppose. Yet he
is
sincere, you tell me."

"Hold his hand."

Michaelmas smiled off-center. "He's dead."

"How?"

The landing warnings came on. Michaelmas adjusted his seat and his belt.

"I don't know, friend ... I don't know," he mused. He continued to stare out the window as the plane settled lower with its various auxiliaries whining and thumping. The wings extended their flaps and edge-fences in great sooty pinions; coronal discharges flickered among the spiny de-perturbance rakes. "I don't know . . . but then, if God had really intended Man to think, He would have given him brains, I suppose."

"Oh, wow," Domino said.

They swept in over the folded hills that protected Cité d'Afrique from serious launch pad errors at Star Control. To Michaelmas's right, the UNAC complex was a rigid arrangement pile-driven into the desert; booster sheds, pads, fuel dumps, guidance bunkers, and the single prismatic tower where UNAC staff dwelled and sported and took the elevators down or up to their offices or the lobby. The structures seemed isolated: menhirs erected on a plain once green, now the peculiar lichenous shade of scrubby desert, very much like the earliest television colour pictures of the Moon. These were connected to each other by animal trails which were in fact service roads, bound to the hills by the highway cutting straight for Cite d'Afrique, and except for that white and sparsely travelled lifeline, adrift — probably clockwise, like the continent itself. Beyond it there was only a browning toward sand and a chasming toward sky, and Saint-Exupery flying, flying, straining his ears to filter out the sound of the slipstream in his guy wires, listening only to the increasingly harsh sound of engine valves labouring under a deficiency of lubricating oil, wiping his goggles impatiently and peering over the side of the cockpit for signs of life.

Michaelmas looked down at his quiescent hands.

Now they were over the hills, and then the ground dropped sharply. Cite d'Afrique opened before them. The sunlight upon it was like the scimitars of Allah. It was all a tumble of shahmat boards down there: white north surfaces, all other sides energy-absorbent black, metallized glass lancing reflections back at catcher panels, louvers, shadow banners, clash of metal chimes, street cries, robed men like knights, limousine horns, foreigners moving diagonally, the bazaar smell newly settled into recently wet mortar but not quite yet victorious over aldehydes outbaking from the plastics, and Konstantinos Cikoumas, Michaelmas saw him as a tall, cadaverous, round-eyed, open-mouthed man in a six-hundred-dollar suit and a grocer's apron with a screwdriver in its bib pocket. He did not see where Cikoumas was or what he was doing at the moment, and he could not guess what the man thought.

They had made Cite d'Afrique in no longer than it takes to pull UN out of New York and decree a new city. Not as old as the youngest of sheikhs, it was the new cosmopoli-tan centre. Its language was French because the men with hawk faces knew French as the diplomatic and banking language of the world, but it was not a French city, and its interests were not confined to those of Africa. It was, the UN expected, a harbinger of a new world. Eloquent men had ventured to say that only by making a place totally divorced from nationalistic pressures could the United Nations function as required, and so they had moved here.

Michaelmas asked Domino : "What's the situation at the terminal?"

"There's a fair amount of journalist activity. They have themselves set up at the UNAC gate.

You hired the best local crew, and they know the ropes, so they're situated at a good angle. EVM

has a local man there to shoot backup footage of Norwood debarking. Then there are UNAC

people at the gate, of course, to welcome Norwood, al-though none of them are very high up the ladder, and there are curious members of the public — mostly UN personnel and diplomats who got early word Norwood was coming in by this route. And so forth."

"Very good. Uh, we may be calling upon your Don't Touch circuit some time along in there."

"Oh, really?" Domino said.

"Yes. I believe I have taken an instructive lesson from the Ecole Psychologique of Marseilles.

Other topic: Do you have a scan on where Konstantinos Cikoumas lives?"

"Certainly. A nice modern apartment with a view of the sea. Nothing exceptional in it. Nothing like the stuff planted all over Star Control. But then, why should they risk Kosta's ever being tied to any exotic machinery that might acciden-tally be found in the vicinity? He and his brother are honest merchants, after all, and who's to ever say different ? Kristiades called him this afternoon, by the way. At about the time we left Berne. A routine talk concerning almonds. It doesn't yield to cryptanalysis. But the fact of the call itself may be his way of saying Norwood's en route, meaning there'll be plenty of press to cover any accidents to Papash-villy."

"You'd think," Michaelmas grumbled, "UNAC might look more deeply at who comes and goes through Star Control."

"They do. They think they do. But they don't think in terms of this sort of attack. They think in terms of someone ripping off souvenirs or trying to sell insurance; maybe an occasional lone flat-Earther; maybe someone who'd like to be an ardent lover. Look what they've done - they've put Papashvilly in his own apartment, which they consider is secure, which it is, and fully private, and they've left him alone. He's playing belly-dance recordings and drinking Turkish coffee, oblivious as a lamb."

Michaelmas snorted. "He eats lamb. But something's got to be done; they're piling trash all around my ability to concentrate." He blinked vigorously, sitting up in his seat, and rubbed his eyes, now that he'd remembered himself. He felt the taste of verdigris far back on his tongue, and growled softly to himself. Except that Domino overheard it, of course. There is no God-damned
privacy!
he thought. None whatever. Any day now, he decided, Domino's re-ceptor in his skull would begin being able to receive har-monics from his brain electrical activity, and then it would be just a matter of time before they became readable.

Merde!
he cried in his mind, and hurled something down a long, narrowing dark hallway. "All right. Are you sure you've found all the little gimmicks around Papashvilly?"

"I've swept the main building, and everything else Pa-pashvilly might approach. I'm fairly certain I have them. I don't understand," Domino said peevishly, "where they got so many of them, or who thought of them, or why this technique. It seems to me they'd want to plant one good bomb and get it over with."

"Not if what they want to kill is the whole idea of effec-tive astronautics. They don't want isolated misfortunes. They want a pattern of wrangling and doubt. They want to roil up the world's mind on the subject. Damn them, they're trying to gnaw the twentieth century to death. They just don't want us poking around the Solar System. Their Solar System? Any ideas along those lines?"

"I believe they are the descendants of the lost Atlantean civilization," Domino said. "Returning from their former interstellar colonies and battling for their birthright. It seems only fair."

"Very good. Now, the gadgets. Do you understand what each of those gadgets could do?"

"I think so. There's a nearly infinite variety. Some will start fires and cut off the adjacent heat sensors simul-taneously. Others will most likely do things such as over-loading Papashvilly's personal car steering controls—at a moderate speed if you're right, at a higher one if you're not.

The elevator you know about. There's something I think will cut out the air-conditioning to his block of flats, pro-bably at the same time the night-heater thermostat over-sets. If I were doing it, that would also be the time the fire doors all dropped shut, sealing off that wing with him inside it, at, say, no degrees Fahrenheit. Should I go on?"

"That will do for samples. Are all of these pieces wired into the building circuits?"

"All that aren't concerned with free-standing machinery like the car. They're all perfect normal-acting components —with a plus."

"All right. I've been thinking. You could trip them, couldn't you? You tested that elevator part."

"Right," Domino said slowly. "I could. Use the building systems to give 'em an overload jolt of current. That would fry 'em as surely as their own triggers could."

Michaelmas steepled his fingertips. "Well, that's all right, then. How's this for a sequence: At the appropriate time, Pavel gets a call to come down to the lobby. You let his door open. He goes out in the hall, and the tampered elevator won't open its doors; you can do that through the normal systems. So he has to take another. Make sure it's a clean one. Meanwhile, you're tidying up behind him. As soon as he clears each problem area, you blow each of the gimmicks in it. By the time he's down to ground level, the building will be safe for him. A little disarranged, but safe. A priority repair order to the garage systems ties up his car, should he get it into his head to go for a spin. Et cetera. Good scenario?"

Domino made a peculiar noise. "Oh, my, yes. Can do. When do you want it?"

"When appropriate. UNAC will surely call him to come down when Norwood is almost there.

Initiate it then."

"All right."

"And Konstantinos Cikoumas. Let him get a call from a UNAC funtionary right away, inviting him to join the greeters at the airport gate."

"No problem."

"Excellent. He has plenty of gates and things to pass through as he approaches the debarking ramp, right? Heat locks, friskers, and so forth."

"It's a hot country. And it's an ultramodern airport, yes."

"Make sure he has no difficulty arriving at the last gate exactly on time, will you?"