Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (43 page)

"What remarks? I deny any."

"Deny a digital recording."

"You've bugged me?"

"The Leader has said it: 'Not a sparrow shall fall.' And we have personal reports as well."

"I don't believe that."

"You have dangerous delusions, Doctor. You believe yourself persecuted. You're not; we've put up with your irrationalities, we've honored you. You believe yourself irreplaceable. You are valuable, we all admit that. But no one is irreplaceable in America United."

The two men fell silent. From somewhere outside the room Terhune heard a rocket exhaust. The shuttle? No, he reminded himself; it would not rise till the next diurn. And he would hear it as a rumble in the ground, not as a sound through vacuum. It must be Hernandez, working on his charged engine throats. Hernandez! Could it be he who—

He caught himself and stilled his mind. That was exactly what this man wanted: to sow distrust, suspicion. He trusted all of them implicitly. He always would. Hernandez as well as Hong, Levinson, Kathryn Leah Hogue, every one of the two-hundred-person complement of the Center.

"I will not produce such a device," he stated to the darkened surface of the Moon.

"We'll discuss it tomorrow."

"You're leaving tomorrow."

"I have all the time I need," said Derein. "That shuttle is at my command. I may leave tomorrow, true. But if I do, you're coming with me. In handcuffs."

When Terhune turned around, livid with anger, the chair pivoted idly. The office was empty.

 
"I dunno what she said, when she left me;
"I dunno what she wrote.
"But the stable was empty, her saddle was missin,
"And I couldn't quite make out her note."
 

The Saddletramp Saloon was dark, the smell of beer and leather, electricity and whiskey and filtered oxygen-enriched air mingling in a strange blend. He stopped just inside the door, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom.

"Mike?"

She was at the far end of the bar, alone, nursing a beer.

He felt his way toward her past the wooden tables. Or almost wood. They looked like oak, as if they had been made by hand and varnished and shipped west and darkened and scarred by time and cigar smoke and spilled whisky and brawling men.

But made, like everything else in the Center, from the soil and rock and dust of the Moon.

"Sorry to keep you waiting."

"Sit down, stranger. Buy a girl a drink?"

Spike came up to them as he hitched himself up on the stool next to her, fixed the heels of his Texas boots in the rungs where they belonged.

"Whiskey," said Terhune to the bartender.

"What'll you have, pard?"

"Whiskey."

"What'll you have, pard?"

"He said, bourbon," said Kathryn. As Spike wheeled away, its casters grating on mooncrete, she said, "He needs tuning. Aural recognition circuits off."

"Ought to shut the damned thing down. Just get your own."

"Oh," she said, turning to her beer. "Is that how it is?"

"I'm sorry. Had a bad time with a boy."

"That Party bozo who oozed off the shuttle today?"

"The same."

"My condolences," said Dr. Kathryn Hogue, slugging back the remains of a full liter mug. From the rings in front of her it was not her first. Terhune studied her from the side as she whistled loud enough at the robot barkeep to wake echoes in the dome.

Kathryn Hogue was the slinger engineer. With four technicians and one outmoded handling robot she had built the first magnetic accelerator tube on the Moon. She was built strong. Under the Levis and plaid Western shirt her hips and shoulders were solid with muscle. He had once seen her pick up a three-hundred-kilo-mass slinger ring and hold it in position for bolting, a feat made even more difficult by a spacesuit. She could take any man in the Center arm-wrestling, and had. Except him. And he half-suspected that she had let him win.

He remembered the first time he had seen her nude.

"No kisses for a working girl?"

"In front of the help?"

"Spike doesn't mind. Do you, Spike?"

"What'll you have, babe?"

"Same again."

"What'll you have, babe?"

"Coors! Switch to receive, you deaf vacuum-sucker!"

Terhune tossed back his bourbon, a slightly but not significantly slower process in lunar gravity than on Earth, and pulled her to him.

They lay nestled like shadow against dust. He traced the outside of her leg, feeling the roughness of a shave a week old. Was she asleep? His hand moved down the outside of her thigh, caressed the hollow of a well-muscled back. He stroked her for a long time.

"Want 'ta tell me about it?" she muttered, her face to the smooth plastron of her cubicle.

He thrust himself up and groped above them. A switch clicked and the unctuous voice of the Leader surrounded them. The Midnight Party Program from Earth. The Station kept the same time as New Washington, though by treaty Standard Lunar Time was Greenwich Mean.

He pulled back his renegade thoughts as her head rose, close, her eyes focusing sleepily. He examined them at a distance of ten centimeters. Green eyes, a brush-touch of hazel, her cheeks slack and crow-tracked below them. He had painted once, during the revolution, when physics was impossible. A watercolor he had done of Enchanted Mesa hung at home next to his print of
The Howl of the Weather
. The hair that lay curled against his shoulder was brown, rich with veins of silver, but still soft and full and deep with her scent. She was not a girl. She was a woman, full-breasted full-hipped, taking on her forties the way she took on a new welding setup. With determination, guts, and style.

Bug? her lips shaped the word.

"Could be," he whispered. "That's one of the things he said."

"Slimy bastards."

He groped again and the volume increased. "I think that will mask it," he muttered.

She sat up, half against him, and examined his face. He pulled his attention away from the slope of her belly, her thighs. "Okay," she said. "Now that the built-up charge in the circuit's been dissipated, let's talk."

"They returned my resignation."

She tasted the air, waiting.

"They want the thing built. No matter what. They'll degrade me to the Yucatan. Ship up a replacement. But they'll get it built."

She was silent for a moment. "Your family?"

"Splitup and Party camps."

"Slimy bastards," she said again.

"You sound like Spike."

"He's got more heart than they do. Are you going to do it for them?"

"I don't know." His whisper broke. "I've been trying to think of a choice—any other choice. But they have the power to do it. They have before. I'd like to tell him where to go with this mindsearching tyranny. Like to High Noon it, pack him on the shuttle."

"This is the frontier, baby."

He smiled as he saw what she meant. "Yeah. The outpost of civilization. Funny, how different it is. In those days a man meant something, even alone. If he had right on his side he had power to back it. Now there aren't any sixguns."

"Or at least the Party has them all."

His voice hissed in her ear, then resumed. "The only alternative I have—realistically—is suicide."

"Don't say that."

"No. I won't. Not because of Gwen. She's Party now anyway. Because of you. If I didn't have you, Kath, I'd do it. They'd get it built anyway. They need it bad, from the way he talked. There must be more internal unrest down there than we find out about from the broadcasts. I was bluffing him. There are two guys at Bell Labs downside who could do it and maybe a team at Carnegie-Mellon—I mean, Eternal Praise—but it would take time for them to reverse-engineer Hong's work. And at least I wouldn't have it on my conscience. But as long as I'm alive, I've got to do as Derein directs, or we all lose."

He waited for her to say something, his heart loud in his ears. What she said was important, He had decided that: whatever she would say, he would do.

"I guess . . . that's all you can do, then."

He sighed, not knowing, yet, whether he was relieved or destroyed; Lucifer, or Faust. Suddenly he felt very tired, and very old.

"Have you got family, Wide Load? Downside?"

"Funny you never asked me that before."

"You're not a real communicative type, Kath. Besides, I never cared before."

"No. I don't."

"That's good."

"Maybe," she muttered.

It was as if she went away from him, though neither of them moved. Then she came back. "Maybe, The way things are."

"It can't last forever. Dictatorships can't last forever."

"That's what they said about the Bolsheviks, cowboy. And they're coming up on a century."

"No family, they can't use them to pressure you. It's better not to be attached to anyone."

"I wouldn't say that's my status right now."

He looked at her in the dim light. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth had a strange shape. He looked for tears, but there were none.

"Are you crying?"

"Fuck you. No."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just hold me."

He turned the program off. They moved together. Not to merge, this time. Just to hold each other. He listened to the seashell hiss of the ventilator bleeding recycled air through the wall of her cubicle, a hiss that became in his mind the rush of wind across dry empty hills softened with sage the color of dusk.

The next day they stood in the half-sphere of Lab D, looking at a spidery workbench. Five of its eight square meters were covered by a seething assemblage of 1C cards, wires, infinite-variable power supplies, and the smelly fluid-bathed trays of bioelectronics and life support.

"This whole thing is the sensor?" said Derein.

"No." Terhune sliced the word short with his teeth. He pointed to one of the trays. "This is the heart of it. The rest is just engineering. Power, support, and tuning."

The Party Member bent over the table. "And that?"

"That's a single-throw relay," said Terhune, staring at him. Again he wondered: ignorance, or a trap?

"Tell me how it works."

"How detailed do you want to get?"

"Just tell me."

"The read function is a modified Fisher psitelechiric regeneration circuit. Field densities of down to two times ten to the minus eight nookies—neural interactions, SI—can be read before noise limit of amplification degrades past the ability of the spectrum analyzer to—"

"Maybe a little more basic, Doctor," suggested Derein quietly.

"You try it, Lo, it's your baby anyway," said Terhune to the short man who stood beside them in nothing but khaki cutoffs, scratching his hairless chest. "This is Dr. Hong."

"You know how lie detectors used to work, Party Member?" said Hong.

"They read heartbeat, skin moisture?"

"That's right. The operator had to infer an internal condition—guilt—from external, physiological manifestations. Sometimes it worked. Kind of. But a man who knew how, or who believed that what he had done was right, often read as innocent."

"I get that."

"Good. Back in the mid-eighties they started to access actual neurological information. Electronically. They learned to read premuscular signals. Speech, before it was transmitted to the mouth and larynx muscles. That's how the embedded transceivers work. You have one?"

"Everyone does now."

"Oh. I haven't been downside for a while. Well, this apparatus—the telechiric-psionic scan, or TLCH-PSI—takes that process further in two ways. First, it reads remotely, by means of an artificial PSI field we generate in this section. The resonance of a living brain repeating, or affirming, a broadcast pattern can be detected by means of the very slight increase in signal strength from that direction. I've got it up to three meters, about ten feet old measure, and I may be able to tweak it up further with a critically-tuned antenna. Twenty feet's the theoretical limit before power output marginalizes against return from other people near the focus. Follow?"

"So far, I think."

"Good. Now the interesting part. There's a delay, if you will, in the repetition of the pattern by a brain, or a mind if you will, if it doesn't
agree
with the signal. If it agrees, the echo is almost instantaneous, on the order of a hundredth of a second or less. If the brain disagrees with the signal, if there's mental resistance, the return is almost as strong as it CFIs—cycles for interpretation—but the
delay
increases about fourfold. It's a slight difference, but we've shown it to be readily detectable, reproducible, and most important, the effect is non-conscious—you can't lie to it."

"Praise the Leader!"

"Uh, exactly." Hong pointed with his chin, Chinese-fashion. "The expert system circuitry here—pretty standard programming, will go well into VHSIC—basically just times it, evaluates and corrects for some other variables, such as sickness or low alertness, by querying with a signal that the brain agrees with—I use "I hope there's some speedmail for me today," which seems to go down smooth with everybody at the Center. The output is a binary decision, go or no-go, that pops this relay. After that, what you do with it is up to you."

"Can I see it work?"

Hong looked at Terhune, who nodded briefly. "Okay," he said. "We'll use you. Stand over here."

The Party Member, looking fascinated despite himself, moved a few feet to the right. Looking down, he found himself in the center of a square chalked on the mooncrete base of the dome.

"Now," said Lo Hong, perching himself in front of a rather archaic-looking keyboard, "Let's see. You're a Party Member, right? What's the current Slogan?"

Derein glanced up. "You don't know, Dr. Hong?"

"I forgot," said Hong, straight-faced.

"The foolish man Leads himself to Doom; the wise man Follows us to Paradise."

"Oh yeah," said Hong, typing busily. "Let's see, better change the bumper, 'cause you probably aren't expecting mail here. You like beer?"

"Party Members do not take alcohol," said Derein frostily.

"Oh yeah. Ice cream?"

"Chocolate chip."