Prisoners of Tomorrow (94 page)

Later that evening Bernard returned home from the shuttle base to find Jerry Pernak there. Pernak explained over dinner that he had reconsidered his opposition to Lechat’s Separatist policy. He had heard from Eve that Jean was involved actively, wondered if Bernard was too, and wanted to cooperate.

Bernard couldn’t see why Pernak had changed his mind. “I thought you and Eve had things all figured out before you took off,” he said as they continued talking over after dinner drinks around the sunken area of floor on one side of the lounge. “Look what’s happening—you’ve left, other people are leaving all over. You were right. Just leave the situation alone and let it straighten itself out.”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it,” Jean said with a hint of accusation in her voice. “You’d like us to be the way they are. But have you really thought about what that would mean? No standards, no order to anything, no morality . . . I mean, what kind of a way would that be for Jay and Marie to grow up?”

Jay and Marie were her latest weapons. Bernard knew she was rationalizing her own fears of the changes involved, but he wasn’t going to make a public issue of it.

“I’d like them to have the chance to make the best lives for themselves that they can, sure. They’ve got that chance right here. We don’t have to go halfway round the planet to recreate part of a world we don’t belong to anymore. It couldn’t last. That’s all over now. You have to bring yourself to face up to it, hon.”

“We’re still the some people,” Jay said from the end of the sofa, looking at his mother. “That’s not going to change. If you’re going to act dumb, you can do that anywhere.” To Bernard’s mild surprise Jay had shown a lively interest in the conversation all through dinner and had elected to sit in afterward. About time too, Bernard thought to himself.

Jean shook her head, still refusing to contemplate the prospect. “But why does it have to be over?” She looked imploringly at Bernard. “We were happy all those years in the ship, weren’t we? We had our friends, like Jerry and Eve, we had the children. There was your job. Why should this planet take it all away from us? They don’t have the right. We never wanted anything from them. It’s—it’s all wrong.”

Bernard felt the color rising at the back of his neck. The pathos that she was trying to project was touching a raw nerve. He refilled his glass with a slow, deliberate movement while he brought his feelings under control. “What makes you so sure I found it all that wonderful?” he asked. “Aren’t you assuming the same right to tell me what I ought to want?” He put the bottle down on the table with a thud and looked up. “Well, I didn’t think it was so wonderful, and I don’t want any more of it. Today I told Merrick to stuff his job up his ass.”

“
You what?”
Jean gasped, horrified.

“I told him to stuff it. It’s over. We can be us now. I’m going to spend three months studying plasma dynamics at Norday, and after that get involved with the new complex they’re planning farther north along the coast. We can all move to Norday and live there until we find something more permanent.”

Jean shook her head in protest. “But you can’t . . . I won’t go. I want to move to Iberia.”

“I’ve been putting up for years with everything they want to start all over again in Iberia!” Bernard thundered suddenly, slamming down his glass. His face turned crimson. “I hated every minute of it. Who ever asked me if that was what I wanted? Nobody. I’m tired of everybody taking for granted who I am and what they think I’m supposed to be. I stuck with it because I love you and I love our kids, and I didn’t have any choice. Well, now I have a choice, and this time
you
owe
me.
I say we’re going to Norday, and goddamnit we’re going to Norday!”

Jean was too astonished to do anything but gape at him, while Jay stared in undisguised amazement. Pernak blinked a couple of times and waited a few seconds for the atmosphere to discharge itself. “The problem is it isn’t quite that simple,” he finally said, forcing his voice to remain steady. “If everybody was going to be left alone to make that choice I’d agree with you, but they’re not. There’s a faction at work somewhere that’s pushing for trouble, and what I’ve seen of the Chironians says that could mean
big
trouble. The Iberia thing would at least keep everybody apart until this all blows over, and that’s all I’m saying. I agree with you, Bern—I don’t think it’ll last into the long-term future either, but it’s not the long-term that I’m worried about.” He glanced at Jean apologetically. “Sorry, but that’s how I think it’ll go.”

Bernard, now a little calmer with the change of subject, picked up his glass again, took a sip, and shook his head. “Aren’t you overreacting just a little bit, Jerry? Exactly what kind of trouble are you talking about? What have we seen?” He looked from side to side as if to invite support. “One idiot who should never have been allowed out of a cage got what he asked for. I’m sorry if that sounds like a callous way of putting it, but it’s what I think. And that’s all we’ve seen.”

“Have you seen the news this evening?” Jean asked. “Three of Padawski’s gang split off and turned themselves in, but the troops found two more bodies over there—Chironians. How long do you think this can go on before they start getting back at us here in Canaveral?”

Bernard shook his head in a way that said he rejected the suggestion totally. “They won’t. They’re not like that. They just don’t think that way.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“I’m getting to know them.”

“And I’m getting to know them better,” Pernak told both of them. Something in his tone made them turn their heads toward him curiously. He spread his hands above his knees. “It’s not exactly that kind of trouble I’m bothered about. But if this goes further than that . . . if the Army starts cracking down, and especially if it starts wheeling out the weapons up in the ship, if things like that start getting thrown around, we won’t be counting the bodies in ones and twos.”

Bernard looked at him uncertainly. “I’m not with you, Jerry. Why should it escalate to anything like that? The Chironians don’t have anything in that league anyway.”

“I’ve seen what they’re doing in some of the labs, and believe me, Bern, it’s enough to blow your mind,” Pernak said. “Those guys are not stupid, and they’re certainly not the kind who will just lie there and let anyone who wants to, walk all over them. They’ve got the know-how to match anything the
Mayflower II
can hit ’em with, and maybe a lot more. They’ve known for well over twenty years what to expect. Well, figure the rest out yourself.”

Bernard stared at his glass for a few seconds, then shook his head again. “I can’t buy it,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything or heard any mention of anything to do with strategic weapons. Where are they supposed to be?”

“We’ve only seen Franklin,” Pernak replied. “There’s a whole planet out there.”

“Ghosts in your head,” Bernard said. “Come on, Jerry, you’re a scientist. Where’s your evidence? Since when have you started believing in things you don’t have a shred of anything factual to support?”

“Gut-feel,” Pernak told him. “The weapons have to exist. I tell you, I know how these people’s minds work.” Jay stood up and left the room quietly. Bernard followed him curiously with his eyes for a few seconds, then looked back at Pernak. “But it’s a hell of a thin case for shipping everyone off to Iberia, isn’t it? And besides, if you’re right, then I’d have thought the best place to stay would be right here—all mixed up together with the Chironians. That way nobody’s likely to start throwing any big bombs around, right?” He turned his head to grin briefly at Jean. “I think Jerry made my point.”

Pernak remained unsmiling. “What about that ship sitting twenty thousand miles out in space?” he said.

Before Bernard could reply, Jay came back in carrying the landscape painting he had brought back from Franklin after his first expedition out exploring. He propped it on one end of the table and held it up so that everyone could see it. “Do you notice anything unusual about that?” he asked them.

Pernak and Jean looked at each other, puzzled. Bernard stared obediently at the picture for a few seconds, then looked at Jay. “It looks like a nicely done painting of mountains,” he said. “Is this supposed to have something to do with what we’re talking about?”

Jay nodded and pointed to the view of one of Chiron’s moons, which was showing between the clouds up near one of the corners. “That’s Remus,” he said. “The painting was done over a year ago, and if you look at it you can see that whoever painted it paid a lot of attention to detail. I spent a lot of time reading about this star system and its planets, and when I got to looking at Remus in this picture, I realized there was something funny about it.” Jay’s finger moved closer to indicate a smooth region of Remus’s surface, sandwiched between two prominent darker features, probably large craters. “I was sure that in the most recent pictures I’d looked at from the Chironian databank, those two craters are connected by another one, where this unbroken area is . . . a big one, several hundred miles across. When I checked, I found I was right—there’s a huge crater right here, and it wasn’t there a year ago.”

Bernard frowned as the implication of what Jay was suggesting sank in. “Did you ask Jeeves about it?” he inquired.

“Yes, I did. Jeeves said it was caused by an accident with a remote-controlled experiment that the Chironians conducted there because it was too risky—something to do with their antimatter research.” Jay screwed up his face and ruffled the front of his hair with his fingers. “But that’s the kind of thing you’d expect somebody to say, isn’t it . . . and Chironians don’t make a lot of mistakes.” He looked around the circle of appalled faces staring back at him. “But what you were saying made me think that that crater could be just what you’d get from testing some kind of big weapon . . .”

Bernard, Pernak, and Jean stared at the picture for a long time. Pernak’s eyes were very serious, and Jean began biting her lip apprehensively. At last Bernard nodded and looked at the other two. “Okay, I’m with you,” he told them. “Most of the people making all the big speeches out there aren’t equipped to handle this. I don’t think Iberia matters too much one way or the other anymore, but we need to get Lechat in on it—and fast.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The first bomb exploded in the center of Canaveral City in the early hours of the morning, causing serious damage to the maglev terminal where the spur line into the shuttle base joined the main through-route from Franklin out to the Peninsula. Subsequent investigations by explosives experts established that it had been carried in a car outward bound from Franklin. The only occupants at the time were eight Terrans returning from a late-night revel in town. They were killed instantly.

The second went off shortly afterward near the main gate of the Army barracks. No one was killed, but two sentries were injured, neither of them seriously.

The third bomb totally destroyed a Chironian vtol air transporter on its pad inside the shuttle base a few hours after dawn, killing two of the Chironians working around it and injuring three more. Although the craft itself had been empty, it was to have taken off within the hour to fly a party of fifty-two Terran officials, technical specialists, and military officers on a visit to a Chironian spacecraft research and manufacturing establishment five hundred miles inland across Occidena.

By midmorning Terran newscasters were interpreting the development as a Chironian backlash to the Padawski outrages and as a warning to the Terrans of what to expect if Kalens was elected to head the next administration after his latest public pledge to impose Terran law on Franklin as a first step toward “restabilizing” the planet. Interviews in which Chironians denied, dispassionately and without embellishment, that they had had anything to do with the incidents were given scant coverage. Reactions among the Terrans were mixed. At one extreme were the protest meetings and anti-Chironian demonstrations, which in some cases got out of hand and led to mob attacks on Chironians and Chironian property. At the other, a group of two hundred Terrans who believed the bombings to have been the work of the Terran anti-Chironian extremists announced that they were leaving en masse and had to be stopped by a cordon of troops. Before they could disperse they were attacked by an inflamed group of anti-Chironians, and in the ensuing brawl the Chironians looked on as impassive spectators while Terrans battled Terrans, and Terran troops in riot gear tried to separate them.

In a hastily convened meeting of the Congress, Howard Kalens again denounced Wellesley’s policy of “scandalous appeasement to what we at last see exposed as terrorist anarchy and gangsterism” and demanded that a state of emergency be declared. In a stormy debate Wellesley stood firm by his insistence that alarming though the events were, they did not constitute a general threat comparable to the in-flight hazards that the emergency proviso had been intended to cover; they did not warrant resorting to such an extreme. But Wellesley had to do something to satisfy the clamor from all sides for measures to protect the Terrans down on the surface.

Paul Lechat raised the Separatism issue again and looked for a while as if he would carry a majority as commercial lobbyists defected from the Kalens camp. But the timing of the moment was not in Lechat’s favor, and Borftein torpedoed the motion fresh off the launching ramp with a scathing depiction of them all allowing themselves to be chased off across the planet like beggars from somebody’s back door. Ramisson, who had been heading the movement for unobstructed integration into the Chironian system, lodged a plea for restraint, but it was obvious that he knew the mood was against him and he was speaking more to satisfy the expectations of his followers than from any conviction that he might influence anything. The assembly listened dutifully and took no notice.

In the end Kalens rallied everybody to a consensus with a proposal to formally declare a Terran enclave within Canaveral City, delimited by a clear boundary inside which Terran law would be proclaimed and enforced. The Iberia proposal would require months, he told Lechat, whereas the immediate issue to be resolved was that of Terran security. In any case, it could hardly be carried out without an electoral mandate. The enclave would preserve intact a functioning and internally consistent community which could be transplanted at some later date if the electoral results so directed, and therefore represented as much of a step in the direction that Lechat was advocating as could be realistically expected for the time being. Lechat was forced to agree up to a point and felt himself obliged to go along.