Ark (31 page)

By the end of the third week, the first segment of the sphere that would be a segment of the mother ship looked in magnified television images like a crescent moon. The first one hundred workers returned to Earth. This time the Spaceplanes landed in daylight, in full view of the dozens of spy satellites that were watching. A second shift of workers took off immediately. Henry saw them safely into orbit, then departed, taking me with him but leaving Ng Fred, the nuts-and-bolts man, in charge of the routine. We had been in Mongolia, and the women had been in space, for three weeks.

The little brown airplane flew Henry and me back to the yurt compound. Why we traveled in such an archaic device was known only to Henry, but after watching the otherworldly perfection of the Spaceplanes and little else for twenty-one days, it was a comfort of sorts to be riding in a rickety machine that barely held gravity at bay.

General Yao awaited us at the yurts. He regarded us with cold eyes. I guessed that he hadn’t had a pleasant visit to Beijing. His insignia of rank had not changed, so for the time being at least he was still a general and a free man. Henry offered a friendly nod. It was not returned. The dust of Hsi-tau saved the moment by going up my nose and causing a paroxysm of sneezing. Henry and Yao, distracted from their staring contest, watched sympathetically.

Henry said, “I think we’d better get her inside.”

“Excellent idea,” said Yao.

Inside the big yurt, Daeng materialized and poured tea into translucent porcelain bowls. I expected Yao to wave his bowl away, but etiquette prevailed. Would it be the polite thing for a Chinese to wait to arrest or shoot his host until after drinking his tea? I had a feeling we might soon find out. We were in one of the most out-of-the-way places in the world and nobody except Ng Fred knew we were here. It was not inconceivable that Henry and I, and maybe Daeng as the only witness, might, at the very least, soon be joining Bear in chains. Henry seemed unperturbed by these possibilities. When he had emptied the bowl and handed it back to Daeng, Yao looked directly at him for the first time.

“First of all, Henry,” he said, “I offer you congratulations on your great achievement.”

“Thank you, General Yao,” said Henry, “but others deserve most of the credit.”

“Nonsense.”

Henry looked interested, but nothing more than that.

“You have stolen a march on the world,” Yao said. “Including your friends. The result is that you have very few friends left in China. Perhaps only one.”

As if he were the inscrutable Chinese and Yao the impetuous foreigner, Henry remained opaque. His expression was attentive, serious, pleasant. If he was apprehensive about what was coming next, as I certainly was, he gave no sign of it.

“Serious violations of Chinese law have been committed,” Yao said.

He enumerated them. The list was long—the smuggling of materiel into China itself and across Chinese territory, many unauthorized intrusions into Chinese airspace—in fact, practically every act, large or small, that Henry had committed on Chinese soil—including bringing me and many other foreigners to Hsi-tau, a restricted security area, without visas.

Yao continued. “You have, in addition, installed on nearby foreign soil advanced ballistic missiles that threaten military and civilian targets within China—weapons that could be launched at a moment’s notice. You did this under the pretext that they would be used peacefully to launch objects into space for scientific purposes and with the promise that any results would be shared with China. Now you have deployed advanced spacecraft into orbit that have obvious military capability, and you are building a space station that has the capacity to launch a devastating attack on China. You kept the existence of these spacecraft a secret from us. China asks itself what your true intentions have been and what they are now. It is clear that it cannot rely on your assurances in the future.”

As General Yao went along, his voice became louder and his military bearing more noticeable. He was standing at attention, boot heels together, shoulders back, face frozen. He had not removed his cap.

“I now come to the most serious of the infractions,” General Yao said. “You have manufactured your Spaceplanes, your booster rockets, and the components for your space station on foreign soil with Chinese labor. The work now being done in space is performed entirely by Chinese workers. Nearly all of these workers are young women. Without official permission or knowledge, they were removed without proper documents to a foreign country, and later sent into space without regard for their safety or good health.”

The period after the last sentence was all but visible as it fell from Yao’s lips. Had he in fact come to the end? Henry waited, in case there might be more. A full minute seemed to pass.

Henry said, “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

He indicated a chair. General Yao sat down in it. He crossed his legs. He removed his cap and placed it on a side table. His gleaming hair was as perfectly combed as if he had just risen from a barber’s chair. Daeng entered with a tray of tinkling glasses and a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. Apparently we had something to celebrate.

Yao drank a single glass of champagne. Henry had his customary tablespoonful. I managed with a shaky hand to drink half a glass. As if stepping out of one movie and into another, the general stopped being the avenging angel and became his old flirtatious self again. He was entirely at ease, chatting me up about my book.

“I’m on page one hundred and thirty-two,” he said. “I wish I had read more, so that I could discuss it more intelligently, but thanks to Henry’s merry pranks, I have had little time for novels lately. So far I like it tremendously. The man-woman scenes—perhaps I should say the woman-man scenes—are most enjoyable.”

“You’re very kind,” I said.

Yao said, “Tell me, my dear, do you write on a computer?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I wish I had known. Certain young friends of mine who are very good at that sort of thing could have hacked into your computer. I could have read your book as you wrote it, as people did with Charles Dickens in Victorian times.”

This banter continued for minutes, shutting Henry out of the conversation. At last Yao looked at his watch, put down his glass, and rose to his feet.

“Forgive us,” he said to me. “Henry and I are going to have a private word. It’s been a pleasure to see you again, dear lady.”

He made an after-you gesture to Henry, and then followed him to the opposite side of the yurt. Yao put a hand on Henry’s shoulder, a distinctly un-Chinese gesture, and peered into his face. He spoke softly. I caught the murmured words.

Yao said, “So, my friend, what shall I take with me back to Beijing?”

Henry reached inside the neck of his shirt and pulled out a tiny computer flash drive that hung around his neck on a thread. He took off this necklace and handed it to Yao, who unbuttoned his collar and strung the thing around his own neck. They shook hands. Yao’s grip seemed positively fervent.

Henry walked him to the door. Through the open door I glimpsed troops snapping to attention. Moments later, engines started. Tires crunched. Yao and his escort drove away. Would they creep back in the night, drug the chow chows again, and pounce on me, asleep or awake?

I needn’t have worried. An hour later, Henry and I were airborne. The skies were as empty as usual, and the ground below as lifeless. It seemed like the last place in the world that anyone would go in order to save the world. No doubt that was why Henry had chosen it.

Daeng woke me at four in the morning with the announcement that we were on our final approach to Andrews Air Force Base. Henry was already awake. He was wearing a shirt and tie and shined shoes. Suspenders—suspenders!—held up the trousers of a dark suit. After the plane taxied, he stood up and put on the jacket. The change from his usual nerd attire could not have been more dramatic if Henry had appeared in the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk. The plane taxied to a gate. Henry got off. He was greeted by a marine in dress uniform who accompanied him to a waiting helicopter with
Marines
painted on its fuselage. Evidently Henry was going to call on the president.

I flew back to New York in a smaller plane. After completing his business in Washington, Henry flew on to Brussels, Moscow, and Tokyo, though I did not deduce these destinations until later in the week, when CyberSci, Inc., announced in a press release—in English this time—that it had granted licenses to the governments of the United States, the European Union, Russia, Japan, India, and China to manufacture replicas of the Spaceplane and the space vehicle that was presently being assembled in orbit by the company’s construction teams. Blueprints and full technical information had been provided to all these governments. No license fees had been charged, nor would any be charged in the future. Each of the governments had solemnly promised, in writing, that the technology would be used for peaceful purposes only.

In the next news cycle, Henry Peel was identified by senior officials in the White House as the inventor of Spaceplane and also of the ship that the space maidens in red were putting together in orbit. Experts at NASA and the Pentagon calculated that it would cost trillions and require many years to manufacture the Spaceplanes. Commentators who had their doubts about plutocrats bearing gifts speculated that Henry’s largesse might lead to the bankruptcy of the United States treasury, if not that of every other country he had just visited.

Notwithstanding this risk, every world power that had received the plans would have to build the hardware and launch the ships because none of them could suffer another country to possess such a novelty without matching it ship for ship.

~ * ~

TEN

~ * ~

1

BEAR’S LAWYERS FILED LAWSUITS IN
federal court in Washington, D.C., and the world court in The Hague, demanding that CyberSci, Inc., Henry Peel, et al., be ordered to cease work on an experiment to produce thousands of genetically engineered embryos in a secret laboratory near Milan, Italy. The lawsuit charged that Henry intended to implant these embryos in the wombs of unsuspecting surrogate mothers, most likely in secret camps in Mongolia. The babies that resulted would be a new human type intended to be as much superior to ordinary human beings in intelligence and physical stature as people were to chimpanzees.

The lawsuit got some of the details wrong or simply invented them for effect, but there was truth enough in Bear’s charges. His timing could hardly have been better, coming as it did after the outing of Henry as the inventor and financier of the Spaceplane and whatever it was that his space maidens were assembling in space. The awe and admiration that this feat had inspired was replaced in the news media overnight by almost universal schadenfreude. The mighty had fallen. How wonderful! A cordon of demonstrators formed around Amerigo’s factories to prevent removal of the monsters. The media went berserk. A plot was afoot to take over the world, and the most elusive trillionaire genius in history was behind it. No wonder he had lived in secret. No wonder no one knew what he looked like. This explained why Henry had hidden himself from the world, why he had escaped being revealed as a villain of technology for such a long time, why he had masqueraded as a benefactor of humanity.

Ng Fred called me. He couldn’t locate Henry. He didn’t use Henry’s name. He used pronouns only. Would I tell
him
to call Ng Fred as soon as possible? I took the message, but told him I had no more idea than he did where
he
might be or when he might reappear.

“If he gets in touch with anyone, it will probably be you,” Ng Fred said. “Tell him to call me immediately. Tell him that before you say hello.”

Days passed. An 8.4 earthquake occurred in Tierra del Fuego. The shock caused a tsunami that engulfed the Shetland Islands and shook loose enormous fragments of ice from Antarctica. Once again great numbers of penguins and seals set sail on a melting floes, followed by a squadron of television camera crews in chartered airplanes. Two days later, a dormant volcano in the Japan Alps erupted, destroying several remote villages and asphyxiating scores of tourists at nearby ski resorts.