Privateers (2 page)

In Paris it was drizzling again. Willem Quistigaard sipped at his aperitif, savoring the golden warming glow of the Pemod as he watched the gray, wet evening slip inexorably into the darkness of night.

“Once they called this the City of Lights,” he said to his young aide, almost sighing at the memory. He was a tall, rawboned man, vigorously active although well into his seventies. His thick hair and mustache still showed traces of gold among the silver. His voice was deep and strong. His big-knuckled hands dwarfed the glass he was holding.

“The lights are on again,” replied the aide. His youthful face looked puzzled. He had the bland, innocent features of a born bureaucrat. Quistigaard knew that the youngster had gone straight from college into government service. Never been in the real world at all; never experienced a day for which he did not have an agenda already prepared. In triplicate.

Quistigaard did sigh. It had been a long day, a long week, and now his flight back to Geneva had been delayed several hours. He sat under the awning of the hotel’s sidewalk cafe and watched the few straggling pedestrians scurrying toward their homes in the cold drizzle.

“I didn’t mean it literally,” he told his aide.

“Oh. Sorry.”

Quistigaard took another sip of the Pemod and felt its warmth spread inside him. But it didn’t taste the same; not like the old days. Nothing was the same anymore.

“When I was your age,” he said, “Paris was the most exciting place in the world. At this time of the evening the city was just beginning to come to life. The restaurants! The cars! The women!” He shook his head and gestured halfheartedly toward the emptying streets.

“If the weather were better …”

“It’s not the weather. It’s 
not
 the weather. It’s here.” Quistigaard tapped two fingers of his right hand against his breast. “The heart’s gone out of Paris. Out of all Europe. It’s all turned gray and dreary.”

“You’re tired,” the aide murmured sympathetically. “Once the sun comes out and you get some fresh air into your lungs you’ll feel differently. Tomorrow you’ll be on the ski slopes. You’ll feel better then.”

“I’ll have to fight my way past Russian tourists,” Quistigaard muttered.

The aide laughed politely. Then, changing the subject quite deliberately, he said, “I thought the conference went rather well. Didn’t you?”

The older man lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug. “Conferences always go smoothly when all the real work is done before the conference opens.”

“You did a magnificent job.”

I suppose there’s some sincerity in that, Quistigaard thought. After all, his job is secure; he doesn’t really have to butter me up.

But he leaned across the tiny table and said, “The International Astronautical Council is nothing but a rubber stamp for the desires and actions of the Soviet Union. Since I am chairman of the council, that makes me the inkpad for the rubber stamp. You are working for an inkpad.”

“That’s not true!” the young man blurted, astonished.

Quistigaard smiled inwardly, pleased to have penetrated his bland façade. If I’m an inkpad, he thought, what does that make my assistant?

“The conference resolved several very difficult issues,” the aide went on, his voice at least half an octave higher than it had been. “The matter of allocating new orbital slots for communications satellites; the question of disseminating geological data from observations made from orbit …”

Quistigaard waved him to silence. “Tell me one issue that was decided in a way that the Russians did not approve.”

The younger man blinked once, twice.

“You see?” Quistigaard almost laughed. “It was the Soviet government which organized the agenda for the meeting. Every item on the agenda was agreed upon before the first session convened. Every issue went the way the Russians wanted it to go. We shuffled a great many papers. We listened to a number of boring speeches. We sat for four days and held sixteen concurrent sessions.”

“We accomplished a lot,” the aide muttered, almost sullenly.

Quistigaard held up his right hand, the thumb and forefinger hardly a centimeter apart. “Not even that much got through that was against the Russians’ wishes. Not one iota of disagreement was allowed. 
They
 run the IAC; you and I are merely figureheads.”

The young man shook his head, frowning.

“Come on, son, admit it. The Russians 
own
 outer space; they run things exactly the way they want to. Just as they run all of Europe.”

For several moments neither of them said a word. Quistigaard took a long pull on his drink. His aide sipped at his demitasse of coffee and tried to avoid the older man’s eyes.

The chill was getting to Quistigaard, despite the yellow heat of the Pernod. He pulled his topcoat closer around him and slouched deeper into the rickety chair.

“They didn’t have to fire a shot, you know,” he muttered. “Once the Americans backed down, they could have had Europe for free.”

“It was the French,” the younger man said. “They forced the Soviet retaliation.”

“Bah! Do you believe what they told you in school? I was 
there
, when it happened.”

“The war?”

“It wasn’t a war. It wasn’t even a battle. The Americans announced their withdrawal from NATO. On the day it became effective, one hotheaded French submarine captain fired a missile—probably at the United States, if you ask me. Or maybe he was a Communist agent provocateur, working for the Russians. That thought occurred to me.”

“That’s impossible!”

Quistigaard smiled frostily at the young man’s naivete. “Was it? The Soviets announce that they have weapons in orbit that can shoot down ballistic missiles. The United States caves in to Soviet demands and quits NATO. One French submarine—part of their pitiful little Force de Frappe—fires one solitary missile from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A Soviet laser beam destroys the missile within three minutes of its launch. The Soviets then launch a missile of their own and detonate a small hydrogen bomb in space, over Paris. The electromagnetic pulse from that explosion knocks out almost all the electrical power systems and equipment from Iceland to Kraków. No electric lights, cars don’t work, heaters don’t work, telephones don’t work, most of Europe is plunged into darkness and cold. And panic. People were throwing up in the streets out of sheer terror. Then three Soviet cruise missiles hit three French military bases with poison gas warheads.”

“The French were preparing a counterstrike.”

“So the history books say. I have my doubts. Most of those texts were written by Russians.”

“No!”

“Perhaps I exaggerate,” Quistigaard said, dryly enough to let the young aide know that he did not believe so.

“But there was no other fighting. There was no nuclear war.”

“Of course not. With the Americans humbled and Western Europe groping in the dark, there was no need for fighting. The Soviets had made their point. Paris, London, even Bonn fell all over themselves in their eagerness to make their accommodations with the new political situation. The Cold War ended almost overnight. And now you see the result.”

“Things are getting better.”

“So I am told.”

Gazing up and down the wide boulevard, the two men saw a dark, wet, chilly, empty street. A steam-powered bus chuffed by, lumbering and lurching. The sidewalks were bare of people, except for a couple of stocky men in long gray raincoats hurrying along. They looked like Russians to Quistigaard.

“The Americans,” the young man whispered, almost as if he were talking to himself. “It’s their fault. They abandoned Europe. They left us defenseless.”

“Yes, that’s true. But they made themselves defenseless first. Once the Soviets established antimissile weapons in space, the American nuclear forces became rather useless.”

“But why? How could they have been so blind?” Quistigaard lifted his glass again, only to find that it was empty. No waiter was in sight.

“The Americans got tired,” he said. “They shouldered the burdens of the world for almost a century, and then they got tired of the job. They tried to take the easy way out. They never felt comfortable about world leadership. In their hearts, all they wanted was for the rest of the world to like them. Like little puppydogs. All they wanted was to be petted and told that they were good. They made several very poor decisions, and before they realized what had happened, the Soviets had a decisive military advantage over them.”

“The antimissile satellites.”

“That was the straw that broke the Americans’ back,” Quistigaard agreed. “But I think they were relieved to quit the race. I honestly think so. They were always isolationists at heart. They never had Europe’s best interest in mind.”

“Well, they’re certainly isolated now. They didn’t even send a delegate to the convention.”

“Why should they? They abandoned their space program. The Soviets have cut off almost all their international trade. They have to learn how to adjust their economy to exist on its internal market alone; for America, there is virtually no overseas trade. I haven’t even seen an American tourist here in Paris. Have you?”

“It’s not the season … .”

“No. They’re done for. They’ll strangle on their own bile. A nation that size can’t exist without overseas markets. The United States will self-destruct within another generation, while the Soviets watch and laugh.”

“And the rest of the world?”

“Oh, we go through the motions of being independent. China is still strong, but its missiles are just as obsolete as the Americans’, against those lasers the Russians have in space.”

“But Europe is rebuilding.”

“Along Soviet guidelines. Even Paris is turning into a dull Socialist grayness.”

“But the Third World nations are still going their own way. They operate their factories in orbit.”

“At Soviet sufferance. And I wonder how long that’s going to last. Did you notice the hubbub in the Russian delegation this afternoon? Something is happening, something big. Malik did not attend any of today’s sessions. He wasn’t even at the final plenary meeting.”

“Yes,” admitted the young man. “That did strike me as odd.”

“Something’s in the wind,” Quistigaard said gloomily. “Something big is about to happen.”