Harvest of Stars (25 page)

And she’s a close friend of … Guthrie’s. Is this significant?”

“M-m, I dunno. What do you plan to do?”

“Have her brought in and quizzed, of course.”

The robot voice went slow, with a clanging in it as of iron. “Sayre, listen. If your agents lay one filthy hand on that lady, you and I are through.”

The face gaped. “What? Wait a minute—” Recovering: “All right, she is a friend and you keep … primitive loyalties. But—”

“Be quiet. Hear me. I’m persuaded Xuan was essentially right. I know how that was done, but I am, and I don’t want to see your cause go under, because every alternative is a flaming lot worse. So I’m going along with this pious fraud of the great nihilist conspiracy, in order that we can nail my other self before he takes back Fireball, which is just about the last force that can bail you out. I’ll have to lead up to the bailout gradually, and admitting that maybe I overestimated the danger won’t help, but never mind now. Do you understand that this is what I understand?

“Okay. Now you, for your part, understand that I don’t have to like the situation, and under all circumstances there is some shit I will not eat. You will leave old Esther Blum alone, do you hear? Unless she’s lost her wits since last I saw her, she’s taken care anyway not to have any knowledge that’d help you especially. But whether or no, she is not for the likes of you to come near. If you do, you’re dead. Got me?”

Sayre trembled. His cheeks were a mottled white. “You’re pretty arrogant, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. My style. And if you’d changed me out of it, I wouldn’t be much use to you, would I? Have you anything else to tell me? No? Muy bien, we’ll keep in touch as agreed. Remember, I have ways of knowing what happens to my friends. Bastante.”

Guthrie cut off.

For a while longer he stood silent. A viewscreen gave a look across Quito, through high-altitude clarity to Andean peaks rearing out of dusk into sunlight. The city below this tower was waking lively. Hereabouts it was altogether modern. The noble ancient buildings around the Plaza
Independencia and the traditional residential quarters were at a distance, oases. Yet they were not museum pieces but where people met, did business, ate, drank, celebrated, flirted, loafed, loved, gardened, slept, begot children, reared them, and finally died. Thus had Juliana wanted growth to go, after the launchport made growth inevitable. Thus had he seen to it, also after her death. That was her right. She had been in on things from the beginning, hadn’t she?

J
ERRY
B
OWEN AND
his dream occupied a two-room apartment in south Chicago. He kept it scrupulously clean but scarcely neat, what with books heaped everywhere, drawing board, desk buried under bescrawled papers, high-powered PC left over from better days. When the Guthries called on him he made coffee, a brand they suspected he could ill afford, and talk ranged widely. Their purpose was to get personally acquainted, a little, now that they had gained some familiarity with his plans and specs, while for his part he was a visionary, not a monomaniac.

Nevertheless, spaceflight inevitably dominated the conversation, which soon turned to its history. He had been there. He not only remembered the glory years, Moon landings and more, he had met many of their heroes and heroines, astronauts, cosmonauts, engineers, entrepreneurs who tried and failed and tried again. Through the twilight that followed he had taken what work in the industry he could find, and on the side designed his own spacecraft, which were never built, and kept on dreaming with the likes of Clarke, Bussard, O’Neill, Forward, Matloff, Hunter, Woodcock, Friesen, the Hudsons. Though he could have grown bitter, in fact he did not forget how to laugh.

The Guthries felt slightly shy about inviting him to their hotel suite a few days later. “I don’t believe a man’s virility
has anything to do with the size of his bank account,” Anson growled, “but does Jerry know that? He might think we want to overawe him, and he’s a proud old rooster.”

“I doubt he’ll give a damn about the surroundings,” Juliana decided; and they phoned.

Bowen arrived punctually. Outside, wind blustered, driving clouds before it whose shadows scythed over roofs and streets. From the room a small park was visible. Yellow with fall, trees tossed their boughs in the streaming air. Dead leaves scurried from them. It was as if all nature were on trek.

When Bowen had taken off his hat and coat, the Guthries saw how he shivered. Restraint snapped across. “Well?” he demanded. “What news?”

“As far as we’re concerned,” Anson told him, “it’s go.”

Bowen gasped. The thin frame lurched. Juliana took his arm. “Easy, there, cobber,” she murmured. “Sit down.” She guided him to an armchair.

Anson stood over him. “What’re you drinking?” he asked cordially.

Bowen didn’t seem to hear. He stared before him and shook his head like one stunned. “We’re on our way,” he whispered. “We’re on our way.”

Anson lifted a palm. “Whoa,” he warned. “We’ve got a long, stiff road ahead of us, and I don’t promise we’ll stay the course or even get very far.”

Bowen’s fingers clutched the chair upholstery. He raised his eyes. “You mean
you
like the design—”

“And the computers do.”

Bowen sagged. “Plenty of people have liked it, year after year,” he mumbled. “But. Always but.”

“I’m sorry. I should’ve gone at things more gradual.”

“Anson’s a bull in a china shop,” Juliana said with a smile, “and life is the china shop. But Jerry, listen, we truly are hopeful. That’s what this meeting is about.”

Bowen straightened. His features kindled anew.

“We’ve looked into costs,” Juliana went on. “We did quite well in Australia, you know. Having heard about you—Well, we think we have enough capital that we’ll
command the leverage for what more will be needed. For a start, at least. If that works out as happily as the analysis suggests it can, we’ll have investors falling over their shoelaces to buy in.”

The wariness left by unnumbered disappointments and rebuffs must voice itself. “In these times?”

“We may not draw any Americans except me,” Anson admitted. “What of it? Australians, Japanese, Europeans, and, yes, I know some South Americans.”

“That’s what we’re counting on,” Juliana added.

“Scramble out of this poor damned country,” Anson said.

“What?” Bowen asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? Now that the Renewal’s in the White House and has a majority in Congress, everything’ll spin from bad to worse till it ends in such a crash that somebody else can maybe pick up the pieces and put them back together in a halfway commonsensical shape. It doesn’t help that most of Islam seems about to go on the warpath.”

Juliana winced. “Which will mean more restrictions, whatever happens,” she said, unwontedly harsh. “Ratcheting the power of the government upward. Randolph Bourne said it a long time ago, war is the health of the state.”

Bowen frowned. He had ample salt left in him. “I didn’t mean any stinking politics,” he snapped. “What are your plans?”

“Our hopes,” Juliana corrected gently.

“I understand. This is all preliminary.” Bowen grinned. “Ha, preliminary to the preliminaries. I am not a virgin in the business world.” Intensity took over. “But speaking in the most general terms, what do you have in mind?”

“Ecuador,” Anson replied. “Perfect sites. High mountains, close to the equator or squarely on it, and … I know people there. Several of the right people.”

“More important,” Juliana put in, “they’re smart and forward-looking. They see what it would mean for their country.”

“For everybody,” Bowen breathed.

“Yeah,” Anson agreed, lacking better words. “Of course, it calls for a pig-sized investment, starting with adequate roads, but once we’ve got your setup installed—”

A practical laser launcher. Rockets are inevitably, fantastically wasteful when they lumber off the ground. Their proper domain is space itself, and even there the chemical rocket ought to be superseded, except for special purposes, by something abler, an ion drive or a plasma drive or the photon drive itself.

A practical laser launcher. The gravitational energy cost of getting into low Earth orbit is modest, a few kilowatt-hours per kilogram; and as Heinlein put it, once you’re in Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere. No device can realize this minimum, but, imaginatively designed for efficiency as well as capacity, a laser, feeding energy to air molecules, can approach it.

If moreover you have a free hand to create and captain your own organization, you need not pay a standing army of ground crews and paper shufflers. You can run your space line as economically as an airline or an ocean freighter line. A mission will cost less, in terms of gross world product, than did any voyage of Columbus.

You do require capital, plus determination, mother wit, and a few well-placed friends. First and foremost, you must have the dream.

Excitement rang in Juliana’s tones: “And the Ecuado-rans would—will—license us to use nuclear engines on ships in space. We’re sure they can be persuaded and can clear it with the UN.”

Anson struck fist into palm. “The ground floor, Jerry,” he said hoarsely. “We’ll be in on the ground floor of everything. Commercial launches are the bare beginning. Power. The
real
solar energy. Forget that groundside fraud and the powersat boondoggle. Save what’s left of our night sky on Earth. Build Criswell collectors and transmitters on the Moon, with Lunar materials. And the mineral resources in the asteroids—”

Juliana laughed. “Dear, I’m afraid you’re instructing your grandmother in the art of sucking eggs.”

“So what?” burst from Bowen. “It’d guarantee a permanent human presence in space. I don’t mind hearing that repeated, as often as you like.”

“Okay!” Anson roared. “We’ll give it our best try, the three of us.”

Bowen gazed past them. “If Helen had been here today—” He shook himself and sprang to his feet like a young man. “I, I—I’ll take that drink now.”

E
ARLY IN THE
afternoon, Valencia went off with Guthrie. “Wait here,” he told Kyra. “I’ll get a car and pick you up.”

“Why don’t I come along?” she asked.

“You don’t need to know where the brotherhood’s local car pool is, Pilot Davis,” he said, politely enough. He’d been quick to gather, in discussion the night before, that that was the honorific she preferred.

Kyra decided she didn’t mind lingering in the coffee shop. The talk had run very late. She and Guthrie had already hatched a couple of different schemes, but they needed Valencia to help them choose the best and work out details. At that, the plan was hairy with contingencies.

The gunjin reappeared sooner than she’d expected and led her out to a fire-red Phoenix. “Isn’t this sort of conspicuous?” she wondered.

He shrugged. “Part of the camouflage, I hope. Fugitives aren’t supposed to ride around in sports cars, are they?” His fingers danced over controls, eased it into traffic.

“Where’s the jefe?”

“Next to my weapons, in a well-screened compartment with lots of electronics around for extra cover. The motor’s been modified, though it doesn’t show.”

This vehicle had carried contraband before, Kyra realized. Glee raised a laugh. She might as well treat her escape as an escapade, at least till it turned around and bit her again.

Valencia took a ramp onto a skyway, set the board for automatic, and entered their route. The Phoenix accelerated smoothly till city vistas blurred past. Kyra barely heard the cloven air. Yes, she thought, the Chinese could certainly build cars. Valencia reclined his seat a few degrees and let it mold itself to his relaxation. “If all goes well, we should make San Francisco about 1400,” he said. “I know a good place for a late lunch, unless you’d rather stop and eat sooner.”

“No, that’s fine. Surprise me.”

“Now let’s start rehearsing you in our story.”

“I remember it quite well from last night.”

“With respect, Pilot Davis, you do not. And there are countless details we didn’t get into. If we’re stopped, you’ll need every last one sliding off your tongue without you having to think. Two, three hours of drill, I’d guess.”

Kyra pouted. “Oh, foo! I was looking forward to this ride.”

Valencia grinned. His biojewel twinkled blue. “I can imagine more amusing ways to pass the time, myself.” With instant steel sobriety: “But getting arrested, deep-quizzed, and sent up for reeducation isn’t among them.”

“Of course, Ne—Sr. Valencia. Let’s go.”

He leaned hard into business. (A while after she fled to Quebec, a Fireball officer there judged that, in view of the startling announcement by Guthrie, she should probably report back to Hawaii. Packer, at Kamehameha, was dubious when they called him.) If the Sepo tried to check on that, they’d pump vacuum. No Fireball consorte in any foreign country would give them the fourth digit of pi without specific orders from the top. Packer, if queried, would smell something in the wind and be noncommittal. (Feeling understandably insecure, she went first to Portland and talked it over with friends she had there.) Her reentry would be recorded in the database at a border station. The Sally Severins had that much access to the official net. She got the impression that it was through Chaotic moles, with whom they had shifty connections. (Bill Mendoza offered to drive her down to San Francisco and accompany her when she sought permission to board
a plane for the Islands. His paralegal business was taking him to that area anyway.) Valencia carried ample ident, and the pseudopersonality had long been in the registries, duly paying its taxes and staying out of trouble.

Easily mastered. But then Valencia began filling in the outline, day by day, well-nigh hour by hour.

The skyway curved groundward and merged with the transcontinental. City fell behind. The car fled south over cropland, along a river coursing through aquaculture pens. Ordered, machine-tended greenness reached out of sight, across terraced hills to mountains half hidden by clouds. A boring landscape, Kyra thought; but how beautiful it must once have been, villages, farmsteads, cows ruddy in meadows and apples ruddy in orchards, maybe blue flax or yellow corn, maybe a boy a-gallop on a horse, surely great stretches of forest, shadowy and resin-sweet beneath the sun.