Michaelmas (3 page)

"And exactly so, if he'd been approached recently for the same purpose, he would have refused. He would have died —more meaningfully, he would have undergone any form of emotional or physical pain—rather than submit. The genius mind is inevitably and fluently egocentric. Any attempt to tamper with its plans for itself—well, putting it more con-ventionally, any attempt to tamper with its compulsive career—would be equivalent to a threat of extinction.

That would be unacceptable."

Michaelmas was smiling in approval through the march-ing words, and pouring himself another glass of wine. "Quite right. Now let's just assume that Herr Doktor Professor N. Hannes Limberg, life scientist, is a merely smart man, with a good library and access to a service that can supply a technique for making people."

There was a perceptible pause. With benevolent interest, Michaelmas watched the not quite random pattern of rip-pling lights on the ostensible machine's surface. Behind him, the apartment services were washing and storing his kitchen-ware. There was the usual music, faint in view of the enter-tainment centre's awareness, through Domino, that there was a discussion going on. It had all the ingredients of a most pleasant evening, early poetry forgotten.

"Hmm," Domino said. "Assuming you're aware of the detail discontinuities in your exact statement and were simply leap-frogging them . . . Well, yes, a competent actor with the proper vocabulary and reference library could live an imitation of genius. And a man supplied with a full-blown technique and the necessary instruments needs no prototype research or component purchases."

There was another pause, and Domino went on with obvious reluctance to voice the obvious.

"However, there has to be a pre-existing body of knowl-edge to supply the library, the equipment, and the un-detected system for delivering these things. Practically, such an armamentarium could arise only from a fully developed society that has been in existence at least since Limberg's undergraduate days. No such society exists on Earth. The entire Solar System is clearly devoid of other intelligent life. Therefore, no such society exists within the ken of the human race."

"But perhaps not beyond the reach of its predictable in-tentions," Michaelmas said. "Well, I assume you've been screening contract offers in connection with the Norwood item?"

"Yes. You've had a number of calls from various networks and syndicates. I've sold the byline prose rights. I'm holding three spoken-word offers for your decision. The remainder were outside your standards."

"Sign me for the one that offers me the most latitude for the money. I don't want someone thinking he's brought the right to control my movements. And tap into the UNAC management dynamic—edit a couple of inter-office memos as they go by. Stir up some generalized concern over Papashvilly's health and safety. Where is he, by the way?"

"Star Control. He's asleep, or at least his phone hasn't been in use lately and his room services are drawing mini-mum power but showing some human-equivalent consump-tion.

UNAC's apparently decided not to disturb him unless they have to."

"Are you saying the electronic configuration of his room is
exactly
the same as on previous occasions when you've known him to be in it asleep?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. He's in there, and he's sleeping."

"Thank you. I want us to always be exact with each other on points like that. Limberg's masters have taken a magni-ficent stride, but I don't see why my admiration has to blind me. I'm not Fate, after all."

He went down through the building security systems and to the taxi dock. The dock was ribbed in pale brownish concrete, lit by blue overheads. Technically, the air was totally self-contained, screened, and filtered. But the quality was not to apartment standards; the dock represented a large, unbroken volume that had needed more ducts and fans than the construction budget could reasonably allow. There was a sense of echoing desolation, and of distant hot winds.

He saw the taxi stopped at the portal. Because the driver had his eyes on him, he actually took out his phone and established ID between the cab, himself, and the building. Putting the phone away, he shook his head. "We ought to be able to do better than this," he said to Domino.

"One step at a time," his companion replied. "We do what we can with the projects we can find to push. Do you re-member what this neighbourhood used to be like?"

"Livelier," Michaelmas said with a trace of wistfulness.

The driver recognized him on the way out to the airport and said : "S'pose you're on your way over to find out if Walt Norwood's really okay?" The airline gate chief said: "I'm looking forward to your interviews with Colonel Nor-wood and Dr. Limberg. I never trust any of your com-petitors, Mr Michaelmas." The stewardess who seated him was a lovely young lady whose eyes misted as she wondered if it was true about Norwood. For each of them, and for those fellow passengers who got up the courage to speak to him, he had disarming smiles and interested replies which somehow took away some of the intrusion of his holding up his machine to catch their faces and words. As they spoke to him, knowing that they might be part of a pro-gramme, he admired them.

For him, it didn't seem an easy thing for a human being to react naturally when his most fleeting response was being captured like a dragonfly in amber. When he had first decided that the thing to do was to be a newsman, he had also clearly seen an essential indecency in freezing a smile forever or preventing the effacement of a tear. He had been a long time getting sufficiently over that feeling to be good at his work. Gradually he had come to understand that they trusted him enough not to mind his borrowing little bits of their souls. From this, he got a wordless feeling that somehow prevented him from botching them up.

He reflected, too, that the gate chief had blown his chance to see himself on network time by confining his remarks to compliments. This touched the part of him that could not leave irony alone.

So for Michaelmas his excursion out through the night-bare streets, and on board the rather small transatlantic aircraft with its short passenger list, was a plunge into refreshment. Although he recognized his shortcomings and unrealized accomplishments every step of the way.

He settled into the lounge with a smile of well-being. His tapering fingers curled pleasurably around a Negroni soon after the plane had completed its initial bound into the thinner reaches of the sky. He gazed around him as if he expected something new and wonderful to pop into his ken at any moment. He behaved as if a cruising speed of twenty-five hundred miles per hour in a thin-skinned pressurized device were exactly what Man had always been yearning for.

Down among the tail seats were two men in New York tailored suits who had come running aboard at the last moment. One of them was flashing press credentials and a broad masculine smile at the stewardess guarding the tourist-class barrier. Even at the length of the plane's cabin, Michaelmas could recognize both a press-card holder and the old dodge of paying cheap but riding high. Now the two men were coming towards him, sure enough. One of them was Melvin Watson, who had undoubtedly picked up one of the two offers Michaelmas had turned down. The other was a younger stranger.

Each of them was carrying a standard comm unit painted royal blue and marked with a network decal. Watson was grinning widely in Michaelmas's direction and back over his shoulder at his companions, while he was already extend-ing a bricklayer's hand towards Michaelmas and forging up the aisle. Michaelmas rose in greeting.

His machine was turned towards the two men. Domino's voice said through the conductor in his mastoid : "The other one is Douglas Campion. New in the East. Good Chicago reputation. Top of the commentator staff on WKMM-TV; did a lot of his own legwork on local matter. Went free-lance about a year ago. NBC's been carrying a lot of his matter daytime; some night exposure lately." Michaelmas was glad the rundown had been short; there seemed to be no way for him to avoid sinus resonance from bone con-duction devices.

"I could have told you, Doug," Watson was saying to Campion as they reached Michaelmas. "If you want to catch Larry Michaelmas, you better look in first class." His hand closed around Michaelmas's. "How are you, Larry?" he rumbled. "Europe on a shoestring? Going to visit a sick relative? Avoiding someone's angry boy-friend?" When he spoke longer lines, even though he grinned and winked, his voice acquired the portentous pauses and nasal overtones that were his professional legacy from Army Announcers' School. But combined with his seamed face, his rawhide tan, and his eyes so pale blue that their pupils seemed much deeper than the whites, the technique was very effective with the audience. Michaelmas had seen him scrambling forward over ripped sandbags in a bloodied shirt, and liked him.

"Good evening, Horse," he said laughing, tilting his head up to study Watson, whom he hadn't seen personally in some time, and who seemed flushed and a little weary.

"Damn near morning," Watson snorted. "Lousy racket. Meet Doug Campion."

Campion was very taut and handsome. There was an in-definable cohesiveness about him, as though he were one solid thing from the surface of his skin on through—maho-gany, for instance, or some other close-grained substance which could be nicked but not easily splintered. From those depths, his black eyes stood out. Even the crisp, short, tightly curled reddish hair on his well-shaped skull looked as if it would take a very sharp blade to trim. He was no more than five-foot-nine and probably weighed less than one hundred fifty pounds. He might readily have been an astronaut himself.

"Very pleased to meet you, sir," he said briskly. "It's an honour and a privilege." He shook Michaelmas's hand with the quick, economical technique of a man who has done platform introductions at fund-raising events. His eyes took in Michaelmas's face and form, and put them away some place. "I've been looking forward to this ever since I got into the trade."

"Won't you please sit down?" Michaelmas said, not be-cause Watson wasn't already halfway into the chair beside him but because Campion put him in mind of the
politesse
of policy meetings and boardrooms. He decided that Cam-pion must be very self-confident to have abandoned his safer and inevitably rapid progress up the network corporate ladder. And he remembered that Domino had been im-pressed by him.

"Thank you, Larry," Campion was murmuring. Watson was settling into his seat as if trampling hay, and tilting his fist up to his mouth as he caught the eye of the first- class stewardess. "Well, Larry," Watson said. "Looks like we're going to be climbing the Alps together, right?"

"I guess so, Horse," Michaelmas smiled.

There was a pleasant chime simultaneously from Wat-son's and Campion's comm units.

Watson grunted, pulled the earplug out of its take-up, and inserted it in place. On Michaelmas's other side, Campion did the same. The two of them listened intently, faces blank, mouths slightly open, as Michaelmas smiled from one to the other. After a moment, Watson held his unit up to his mouth and said: "Got it. Out," and let the earplug rewind. "AP bulletin," he explained to Michaelmas. "One of their people got a 'No Comment' out of UNAC about some of their people having flown to Limberg's place. Jesus, I wish that girl would get here with that damned cart; I'm tapering off my daughter's engagement party. Looks like there's something happening over there after all."

Michaelmas said : "I imagine so." A No Comment in these circumstances was tantamount to an admission—a UNAC public relations man's way of keeping in with his employers and with the media at the same time. But this was twice, now, in this brief conversation, that Horse Watson had hinted for reassurance.

"You buy this story?" Watson asked now, doing it again. Michaelmas nodded. He understood that all Watson thought he was doing was passing the time. "I don't think Reuters blows very many," he said.

"Me too, I guess. You have time to pick up any crowd reaction?"

"Some. It's all hopeful." And now, trading back for the relay of the AP bulletin, Michaelmas said :

"Did you pick up the Gately comment?" When Watson shook his head, Michaelmas smiled mischievously and held up his machine. He switched on a component that imitated the sound of spinning tape reels. "I—ah—collected it from CBS in my cab. It's public domain anyway. Here it is," he said as the pilot lights went through an off-on sequence and then held steady as he pressed the switch again.

Will Gately was United States Assistant Secretary of Defence for Astronautics, and a former astronaut. Always lobbying for his own emotions, he was the perfect man for a job the administration had tacitly committed to inepti-tude. "The wave of public jubilation at this unconfirmed report," his voice said, "may be premature. It may be damp-ened tomorrow by the cold light of disappointment. But tonight, at least, America goes to bed exhilarated. Tonight, America remembers its own."

Watson's belly shook. "And tomorrow Russia reminds the world about the denationalization clause in the UN astro-nautics treaty. Jesus, I believe Kerosene Willy may revive the Space Race yet."

Michaelmas smiled as if Gately's
faux pas
hadn't fore-closed Major Papashvilly's chances of immediate promotion. Especially now, the USSR couldn't risk raising the world's eyebrows by making their man Norwood's equal in rank. By that much, Gately and the Soviet espousal of fervent gentle-manliness in pursuit of the Balanced Peace might have conspired to put the spritely little Georgian in more certain danger.

Campion said, startlingly after his silence, "The good doctor sure knows how to use his prime time." Michaelmas cocked his head towards him. Campion was right. But he was also making himself too knowledgeable for a man who'd never met Limberg. "Three-thirty a.m. local time on September twenty-nine when he got that Reuters man out of bed." Campion was documenting his point. "Hit the good old USA right in the breadbasket", meaning the ten p.m. news on September 28.

It occurred to Michaelmas that Campion realized Lim-berg had moved as if to play directly to the Gately-types. But Watson was missing that because Campion had made himself annoying.