The Goliath Stone (23 page)

“Oh, good one! Smooch a lot of girls, spread the bots through the leftist population, and Congress never sabotages the space program because anyone who proposes it drops dead of a stroke. I like it. Who goes next?”

“Cut off John Wilkes Booth’s big toes so he can’t climb a flight of stairs,” said May.

“Huh!” said Mycroft. “In the Minimalist event we might just have a gold. Unless you’ve got one, Alice?”

“Go back to be your girlfriend in high school,” she said. “I’d just like to see what you’d have done if you were healthy.”

“I’m declaring a winner,” said Toby.

May said, “We’ll reach the rock in an hour and ten minutes. Brake first, of course.”

Toby asked, “How are you doing, Mycroft?”

“Fine. You? Alice? You never know until you’re there.”

“Good,” said Alice, and Toby said, “I was born falling.”

They fell.

Mycroft said, “I got through customs once by asking the guy how many people a year thought they were making an original joke, and didn’t know the difference between ‘declare’ and ‘declaim.’ He just laughed and waved me past.”

“What was in your luggage?” Toby said.

“Underwear.”

“Well, don’t go making it sound like you pulled a fast one,” Toby said.

“It was his wife’s.”

All three listeners said, “
What?
”

“Okay, I made that part up. —I just didn’t want the hassle.”

Alice began laughing helplessly. May said, “He’s like this all the time, isn’t he?”

“Pretty much. I’d hate to tell you what happened at my aunt’s funeral,” said Toby.

“Hey!” Mycroft said, indignant. Then he laughed. “Okay, you got me.”

“Stop, I can’t wipe my eyes in this thing,” Alice said, still laughing.

“Screen on the left forearm,” Mycroft said. “Scroll down to blue, zoom the face, and fingermouse. Red is scratching. Green is blowing your nose.”

May gaped at him, then looked at Alice. “My God. Even Heinlein didn’t think of that one.”

“I wouldn’t care to bet,” Mycroft said. “All we know is he didn’t put it in a story. And it might have been in an unmutilated version of
Have Spacesuit—Will Travel
.”

“I could just beat the crap out of that editor he had, when I think what’s been lost,” Alice said. When they all looked at her, she said, “I may not be a diehard sci-fi fan, but I’m not illiterate.”

“She’s long dead,” Mycroft told her. “The dogs’ll get her.”

“Dogs?”

“In Hell, people who destroy treasure for a feeling of power are put in a bleak forest where they’re chased and torn apart by dogs,” Mycroft said. “Dante Alighieri.”

“Lot of mothers there,” she said.

“He didn’t say.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“I wasn’t arguing.”

Toby’s mother had been a warm, gentle woman, whose one vice was grafting new slips onto what had ultimately become an extremely strange-looking apple tree, and he
really
didn’t want to hear any more on this topic. He supposed his reaction was akin to survivor’s guilt, but he still changed the subject. “You got an attachment for gum on these suits?” he said.

“Damn,” Mycroft said. “Let me make a note for the next model.” They were all silent for a while. Then Mycroft said, “Done.”

“You’re actually doing it?”

“Gum is very comforting. Great idea.”

“Uh-oh. They’re matching course with us. Crap,” May said. Then she swung her arm around without looking, to point unerringly at Mycroft. “Say it and I hit your ejector switch.”

“There’d be no
point
saying it
now,
” Mycroft said, sounding huffy.

“I’m not used to being the dumbest one in the room,” said Alice. “Say what?”

“‘Have some gum,’ or words to that effect,” May said. “This man is always On.”

“Not really. He prefers under.”

Even if Toby cut his microphone and opaqued his helmet, May would have seen him shaking. He held it in.

“
Et tu,
Alice?” said May.

“Actually—”

“Let it go,” said Mycroft.

Toby still held it in. It occurred to him that after this exercise of will, levitation might be worth a try.

“They’re still about ten miles away,” May said. “Close enough to have shot us with something by now, so I’d say that confirms they want Toby alive.”

XXXII

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.

—SAMUEL BUTLER

1

“As I see it, our best course is to take control of the other craft and dump LOX until they have just enough to get home,” said Sam.

“General, have you considered taking the crew aboard as prisoners and having one of us fly it back?” said Stephen.

“Why not just make them walk the plank?” said Jack.

“I was making a suggestion. Do you have to be so nosy?” Stephen said.

“You forgot to say ‘you people,’” said Marty.

“I have had about enough of you reading things into what I say.”

“You forgot to say ‘you people,’” said Marty.

“
Listen
—”

Sam cut everyone’s mikes. “Now hear this,” he said in a voice gone dangerously quiet. “When we have matched course, we will grapple, close, and take control of the other craft. We are here to prevent the world from being taken prisoner. In the course of this, we are obliged to set an example of lawful behavior. If anyone has any doubts about what constitutes lawful behavior, say so and you will be relieved of duty. Are there any questions?” He turned the mikes back on.

Edmundson kept his mouth shut. Jack wished he had his cell camera. There were astronauts who would pay to see that.

2

Foundry’s surface was pretty well covered with a phase-coordinated telescope array, much less vulnerable than a single mirror, vastly larger in aperture, and far easier to aim. Set had been disturbed by the exchange of radio messages earlier, and was now even more disturbed by the deliberation of the second ship’s approach. The concept of bluffing was known from monitoring broadcasts—a job that grew constantly bigger as they got closer to Earth—but the examples of how stupid it was to assume someone was doing so were numerous, and most of them were not fiction.

The messages they had had to decode from military “encryption”—as the senders considered it—had always been disturbing, but they were getting worse.

More disturbing yet was the fact that, if the ships maintained their courses, rendezvous would occur while they were on the other side of the Earth from Foundry. It was as if the pursuers had planned that.

Set passed on his concerns to the rest. Shortly after the message had been sent to Forge, a reply came from Socrates:

Send your own intercept craft.

A design suggestion followed almost ten seconds later; clearly it had been given a lot of thought. It was simple and could be made from parts on hand.

It was launched in twenty minutes.

XXXIII

[He] had heard of fighting fair, and had long ago decided he wanted no part of it.

—TERRY PRATCHETT

1

As
Envoy
was closing with
Firebird,
Mycroft said, “I can hit their windshield from here.”

The U.S. ship was about a quarter of a mile away. “With what, your new nanos?” said May.

“Some of them, certainly, but most would just end up adrift, and I’d rather not. I was thinking of using one of the guns Alice was thoughtful enough to collect while I was doing first aid. They’d have to rely on us to get them home.”

May turned to look at each of them in turn, then settled on Mycroft. “I didn’t see her do that.”

“Neither did I, but her bag was about sixty pounds heavier than it had been. Not every kind of intelligence shows up on an IQ test.”

“Huh,” said May, as Alice looked pleased. “Wouldn’t that be an act of war?”

“They’re not asking permission to come alongside,” Mycroft said. “And their cargo bay is opening. QED, they are engaged in piracy.”

May turned swiftly and checked her screen. He was right. Four astronauts were visible coming out of the cargo bay, and they were all carrying equipment. She narrowed her eyes. “That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got this.” She tapped her keyboard and sent a message to the other ship’s BIOS.

The reentry shield on
Envoy
’s belly detached and began moving away from the spaceplane.

When May turned to look at Mycroft again, he was watching his own screen in silence, his mouth hanging open. “You’re not the only one who prepares for emergencies,” she said. She switched to voice transmission and hailed the other ship.

2

Charles Stuart Loomis had always had a curious advantage over most members of the astronaut corps: he never showed any trace of bone loss no matter how much time he spent in free fall. He’d also spent five of the past six years concealing a severe and progressive combination of rheumatoid and osteoarthritis—the same trouble that had driven his mother to suicide. Early in ’51 he began suspecting a decline in mental clarity as well. While pain wouldn’t stop him from doing a good job, hiding a lack of alertness would have been criminal, so he’d started giving himself regular intelligence tests. The results had been equivocal … until he took an IQ test the day after Thanksgiving, and scored thirty points higher than he had two weeks before. Five days later, he’d been about to take his morning ketoprofen and suddenly realized the redness, pain, and swelling in his knuckles were gone.

He was also having no more trouble keeping his weight down—everything he ate wasn’t automatically put into storage. His wife Jennifer thought it might be due to her renewed interest in him … or his increased energy may have been the cause of that interest. Or both. In any case, it was like being kids again; if they had an important appointment somewhere, they didn’t dare change clothes in the same room.

Charley thought it had something to do with nobody getting AIDS anymore.

When he learned about the mission, to rendezvous with what had been the target of a nanotech probe, he’d realized immediately that Toby Glyer would be trying to get there any way he could too; and Charley Loomis resolved not to let anything bad happen to Toby Glyer.

In the course of twenty years in the astronaut corps, he had overheard what turned out, when he thought about it, to be a staggering amount of dirt on any number of influential people in the NASA and Navy hierarchies—all of which he now recalled with a clarity that still amazed him. He’d gone to have a few little chats with some of them, and had ended up being the first man chosen for the
Envoy
mission. He’d also been promoted from captain to commodore, a rank typically used only in wartime. As a flag officer, he’d have been mission commander, if not for the fact that President Foster was an Air Force fighter jockey. Still, for someone who was a pilot rather than an aviator, Brigadier General Samson Quinn was steady enough.

Unfortunately, that meant that Charley, as second in command, had to wait in the truck.

Of course, in the present circumstances, perhaps that wasn’t unfortunate. The other four had all gone back to the hold to gird up their loins or whatever, and Charley sat watching the instruments.

There was a little bump.

The heat shield light went red.

He tapped keys at high speed. It had jettisoned. “Jesus H. FUCK!” he yelled, and hit the command link. “General, our reentry shield has just separated, and the computer says it was our idea. I wasn’t touching the board. I think it’s an override command.”

“Good day, gentlemen,” the woman piloting the other ship said into all their earphones. “I am certain you will be relieved to learn that you are still able to land without burning up. It requires only that you turn your ship, burn just about all your fuel coming to a halt relative to the ground, and fly your craft down as an airplane. Of course, you only have enough fuel to do that with an empty cargo bay. I suggest you dump it out now.”

*   *   *

“That’s the first shot,” Sam said.

Stephen had a recoilless, and he started to put a rocket into it.

Jack and Marty had chosen adhesive-restraint launchers, whose ammo was popularly known as “booger bombs.” Two of them hit Stephen just about simultaneously, and began foaming up and forcing his arms away from his torso. “What is
wrong
with you two?” he demanded.

“Don’t know about Marty,” said Jack, “but with me it’s that whole ‘thou shalt not kill’ thing.”

“Works for me,” said Marty.

“Take him back in,” said Sam, taking the launcher.

The two of them each had one hand on Stephen and one hand on their lines when Sam locked on and put a shaped-charge target-seeker through
Firebird
’s LOX tank.

“Jesus, Sam!” said Jack.

“I have very clear orders from the president,” said Sam, not sounding like he objected to them.

Then his helmet burst.

They got him into a survival bubble, because that’s what you do, but Jack didn’t expect much. Sam’s head was charred, and his body was hot enough to feel through Jack’s gloves. He could feel brittle crackles as they bent Sam’s arms enough to get him into the bubble.

Something caught his eye, and he looked up to see a thing like two fat metal donuts on a meshwork pipe come apart between the ships. One of the donuts shot itself along the pipe and disappeared ahead of them. The other one, still on the pipe, took up station above the open hold, and pointed a lot of thin rods at
Envoy
.

Jack was keenly reminded of why this mission was so important.
Firebird
was not the threat.

XXXIV

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.