Michaelmas (5 page)

"Wait one," he said while he chose his words.

Time was when men of Horse Watson's profession typic-ally never slept sober, and died with their livers eroded. It must have been fun to watch the literate swashbucklers make fools of themselves in the frontier saloons, indulging in horse-whippings and shoot-outs with rival journalists and their partisans. But who stopped to think what it was to have the power of words and publication, to discover that an entire town and territory would judge, condemn, act, reprieve, and glorify because of something you had slugged together the night before? Because of something you had hand-set into type, smudging your fingertips with metal poisons that inexorably began their journey through your bloodstream? For the sake of the power, you turned your liver and kidneys into spongy, irascible masses; you tainted the tissue of your brain with heavy metal ions until it became a house haunted by stumbling visions. Alcohol would temporarily overcome the effect. So you became an alcoholic, and purchased sanity one day at a time, and made a spectacle of yourself. It was neither funny nor tragic in the end —it was simply a fact of life that oper-ated less slowly on the mediocre, because the mediocre could turn themselves off and go to sleep whether they had done the night's job to their own satisfaction or not.

Time was, too, when men of Horse Watson's profession had to seek out gory death because that was all their bosses were willing to either deplore or endorse, depending on management policy. But let no man tell you it's possible to live like that and not pay. The occupational disease was martinis for the ones that needed a cushion, and, for the very good ones, cancer. For good and bad in proportional measure there was also the great funny plague of the latter half of the century—nervous bowels and irritated stomachs. Who could see anything but humour in a man gulping down tincture of opium and shifting uneasily in his studio seat, his mind concerned with thoughts of fistula and surgery, his mind determinedly not preoccupied with intestinal resections and where that could lead? Loss of dignity is after all one of the basics to a good punchy gag.

And time was when men of Horse Watson's profession were set free by the tube, the satellites, and finally the holo-gram. Now all Horse Watson had to do to pick and choose among contending employers was to make sure that his personal popularity with the little folks in the allocated apartment remained higher than most. It was a shame he knew no better way to do this than to be honest. A strong young head full of good voodoo could make mincemeat out of a man like that.

Men like Horse Watson were being cut down quickly. It was one of the nervous staples of recent shop gossip, and that, too, was having its effect on the scarier old heads. They came apart like spring-wound clocks when the tough young graduates with their 1965 birth certificates popped out of college with a major in Communications and a pair of minors in Psychology and Politics, and a thirty thousand new dollar tuition-loan note at the bank.

Michaelmas said to Domino: "He knows he shouldn't say things like that. He knows some of it doesn't make sense. He trusts me, and he thinks of me as one of his own kind. He's apologizing for slipping away and leaving me with one less colleague. If you can see that, you can see that if you think kindly of him, you're being less hard on yourself. He doesn't realize he's casting aspersions on our work. He doesn't know what we do. He thinks it's all his own fault. Now please be still for a while." He massaged the bridge of his nose. He did not look at Campion. He was having a split-second fear that if he did, the man might open one eye and wink at him.

It was truer than ever that airports look the same all over the world. But not all airports are located in the Alps.

Michaelmas descended just behind Watson and Campion, into a batting of light reflected from every surface, into a cup of nose-searing cool washed brilliance whose horizon was white mountaintops higher than the clouds. The field was located high enough above the Aar, and far enough from the city itself, to touch him with the sight of the Old City on its neck of land in the acute bend of the river, looking as unreally arranged as a literal painting. It was with that thought, blinking, that he managed to locate him-self in time, space, and beauty, and so consider that his soul had caught up with him.

There was a considerable commotion going on at the shuttle lounge debarking ramp.

Movement out of the lounge had stopped. Watson had been right about any number of details : it was likely that half the journalists in Europe were on the scene, and there was a gesticulating, elbowing crowd of them there, many of them in berets and trenchcoats, displaying the freelance spirit.

Even the people with staff jobs had caught the infection either here or much earlier, and there was the usual jostling with intent to break directed at any loosely held piece of equipment. There was a bewildering variety of that — sound and video recorders both flat and stereo, film cameras, and old minicams as well as holograph recorders —as if every pawnbroker on the continent were smiling this morn-ing. Most of the people down here had to be working on speculation. There weren't enough media contracts or staff jobs in the world to support that mob, or, truth to tell, speculation markets either.

The current compromise pronunciation of his name seemed to be 'Mikkelmoss!' and emerged most often from the gaggle of voices. Lenses glittering like an array of Assyrians, they tried to get to him in the lounge or cannily waited for him to ensnare himself among them. Michael-mas could feel himself blushing, his round cheeks hot under his crinkling eyes. He could not help smiling, either, as he discovered a staff cameraman for Watson's client network actually shooting for a zoom close-up of him over Watson's shoulder. It was Campion who raised his comm unit to block that shot; Watson had his head down and was work-ing his way through the crowd with effective hips and shoul-ders.

The first man to get to Michaelmas —a wiry, shock-headed type with blue jaws, body odour, and an elaborate but obsolescent sound recorder—clutched a hand-rail, planted his feet to block passage fore and aft, and shot his microphone forward. "Is true dzey findet wreckidge Kolonel Norwoot's racquet?" "What is your comment on that, sir, please?" came from a BBC man down on the ground beside the ramp with a shotgun microphone, an amplifier strapped over his mouth and phones on his ears. His camera was built into his helmet, exposure sensors flashing.

And so forth. Michaelmas made his way through them, working his way towards Customs and the cab rank, feeling a sudden burst of autumn chill as someone opened a door; smiling, making brief reasonable comments about his own lack of information. Domino was saying to him:

"Remem-ber, Mickeymouse—you are but a man." As he cleared the fringes of the crowd, Domino also said : "You have a suite at the Excelsior and an eight a.m. appointment with your crew director. That is forty-eight minutes from . . . now."

Michaelmas re-set his watch.

It was a beautiful drive into the city with the road winding its way down to the river, looping lower and lower like a fly fisherman's line until unexpectedly the cab crossed the stonework bridge and they were in the narrow streets of the Old City.

Michaelmas loved Switzerland. He loved the whole idea of Switzerland. He sat back among the cushions with the cab's sunroof open at his request. He beamed through the rented windows at the people going about their business and out of the fairy-tale buildings that were still preserved, with hidden steel beams and other subtle interval recon-structions, among the newer modern buildings that were so much more efficient and economical to erect from scratch.

"The escape capsule wreckage has not been reported as yet," Domino said. "There have only been a few daylight hours for the helicopters to be out. In any case, we can expect it to be under a considerable accumulation of snow, and not indicative of anything of value to us. If Limberg can produce a genuine Norwood, he can produce genuine wreckage."

"Quite so," Michaelmas said. "I don't expect it to tell us anything. But it would be nice if I were the first newsman to report it."

"I am on all local communications channels," Domino said tartly, "and am also making the requisite computations. I have been doing that since before arranging your hotel reservations."

"Didn't mean to question your professional competence," Michaelmas said. He chuckled aloud, and the cab driver said:

"
Ja, mein Herr,
it is a day to feel young again." He winked into the rear-view mirror. It was a moment before Michael-mas realized they had been driving by an academy for young ladies in blue jumpers and white wool blouses, and in their later teens. Michaelmas obligingly turned in his seat and peered back through the rear window at sun-browned legs in football-striped calf socks scampering two by two up the old white steps to class. But to be young again would have been an unbearable price.

The suite in the Excelsior spoke of matured grace and cultivated taste. Michaelmas looked around approvingly as the captain supervised the bustling of the boys with his luggage and the plod of the grey old chambermaid with his towels. When they were all done and he was sated with wandering from room to room through open doorways, he found the most comfortable drawing-room chair and sank into it. Putting his feet on an ottoman, he called down-stairs for coffee and pastry. He had about fifteen minutes before his crew director was due. He said to Domino: "All right, I suppose there are certain things we have to take care of before we get back to the main schedule."

"Yes," Domino said unflinchingly.

"All right, let's get to it."

"President Fefre."

Michaelmas grinned. "What's he done now?" Fefre was chief of state in one of the small African nations. He was a Harvard graduate in economics, had a knife scar running from his right temple to the left side of his jaw, and had turned Moslem for the purpose of maintaining a number of wives in the capital palace. He sold radium, refined in a Chinese-built plant, to anyone who would pay for it, running it out to the airport in little British trucks over roads built with American money. He had cut taxes back to zero, closed all but one newspaper, and last month had imprisoned the seventy-two-year-old head of his air force as a revolutionary.

Domino said : "The Victorious Soviet People's Engineer-ing Team has won the contract to design and build the hydro-electric dam at the foot of Lake Egendi, despite being markedly underbid by General Dynamics. A hun-dred thousand roubles in gold has been deposited to Fefre's pseudonymous account in the Uruguayan Peasant Union Bank. It would be no problem to arrange a clerical error that would bring all this to light."

Michaelmas chuckled. "No, no, let him go. The bank needs the working capital and, besides, I like his style. Anything else?"

"The source of funds for the Turkish Greatness Party is the United Arab Republic."

"Imagine that. You sure?"

"Quite. The Turkish National Bank has recently gone into fully computerized operation, with connections of course to London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, and so forth. The Continental Bank and Trust Company of Chicago is in correspondence with all those, as part of the international major monetary exchange body, and is also the major and almost sole stockholder in the State Bank and trust Company of Wilmette, Illinois, where I have one of my earliest links. When Turkey joined that network I immediately began a normal series of new data integrations. I now have all the resulting correlations, and that's one of them."

"Do you mean to say the Arabs are paying the Turks by cheque?"

"I mean to say there's a limit to the number of gold pieces one can stuff into a mattress.

Sooner or later someone has to put it somewhere safe, and when he does, of course, I find it."

"Yes, yes," Michaelmas said. He had a very clear picture in his mind of suave, dark, blue-eyed gentlemen in white silk suits and French sunglasses passing canvas bags that rustled to somewhat rougher-looking people in drophead Bentleys by the light of the desert moon.

Gentlemen who in turn paid for their petrol on a Shell card and booked air passage from El Fasher to Adana against per-sonal checks which would be covered by deposit of lira notes which had trickled through the weave of the money-bags. On balance, if you had a mind like Domino's and knew all credit card numbers, the flight times of all air-liners, and the vital statistics of all gentlemen known to engage in the buying and selling of other gentlemen and submachine-guns, in all portions of the world, there was no great trick to it. "I know you can take a joke," he said to Domino. "But sometimes I do wish you could understand a jest."

"Life," said Domino, "is too short."

"Yours?"

"No."

"Hmm." Michaelmas pondered for a moment. "Well, I don't think we need any expansionist revolutions in Turkey. The idea of armoured cavalry charging the gates of Vienna again is liable to be too charming to too many people. Break that up, next opportunity." Michaelmas looked at his watch."All right. Any more?"

"US Always has learned that Senator Stever is getting twenty-five thousand dollars a year from that north-western lumber combine. USA's Washington office made a phone call reporting it to Hanrassy's national headquarters at Cape Girardeau."

"In that simple-minded code of theirs? If they're planning to save the whole country from the rest of the world, you'd think they'd learn to respect cryptanalysis. Any informa-tion on what they're planning to do with this leverage?"

"Nothing definite. But that brings to six the total of senior Senators definitely in their pockets, plus their ideological adherents. This is not a good time for USA to be gaining in power.

Furthermore, although it's very early in the morn-ing in Missouri, Hanrassy's known to work through the night quite often. I won't be surprised if a Senatorial inquiry starts today on why Colonel Norwood wasn't im-mediately reinstated as head of the Trans-Martian flight. Even allowing for her intake of amphetamines, Hanrassy's annoyingly energetic."