The Ophiuchi Hotline (24 page)

There was no reply, so Lilo went on.

“We would like to point out that we are in possession of a powerful radio. I’m sure Tweed’s been worried about that for some time now, wondering where Cathay is and what he’s going to do. He’s probably ready to get out, quick, if something should start to break. Okay, that’s fine. But it’s bound to take him some time. What we want you to ask him is this: How much time is he willing to buy?”

“Explain that, please.”

“I was going to. First, an answer from you. How long would it take you, not counting ninety-six minutes of lagtime, to get Tweed on the radio, talk to him and get his answer? Don’t hesitate; tell me right now.” Cathay had emphasized the importance of that. According to him, Vaffa was not very bright, and was not a good liar. He should not be given time to think. They would be helped by the fact that his impulse would be to ask Tweed for orders as soon as possible.

“Well, I…”

“
Now!
Tweed’s life depends on this. Don’t make us doubt what you’re saying.”

“I speak to him in code, through a laser that is relayed to Luna by a satellite, so the signal will not be traced. The lagtime will be ninety-seven minutes today, because of that. He carries a prompter; it has never taken me longer than three minutes to get to him.”

“Very well. It’s bargaining time. Cathay and I are interested in the fate of the people under your guard. We realize that you are capable, if ordered to do it, of killing them. Tweed might order you to do that, we decided.”

Lilo found it hard to believe, but admitted that Cathay knew more about Tweed and Vaffa than she did.

“We want you to tell the Boss that would be a very stupid thing to do.

“We’re going to broadcast the facts about the Poseidon installation all over the system. If they catch him, they’ll kill him.

“The important thing to him is
when
we do this broadcasting. Now listen carefully. If he does as we tell him, we will hold off for a period of one standard month. Obviously, it’s not in our interest to publicize this place. We don’t want it known what’s going on out here because we’re all illegals in one way or another, including you. If an Eight Worlds ship lands on Poseidon, we’ll all be executed.

“What we have to do is work toward our common interests. We need time, and so does Tweed. But we also need assurances that the people down there will not be massacred.” She took a deep breath.

“Here’s the deal. Tweed is to issue orders to you, and all your clone brothers and sisters, to leave the station and congregate in the open one kilometer from the nearest entrance. Unarmed. Before you leave, you are to deactivate the barrier leading to your private quarters and allow Niobe and Vejay to enter and see for themselves that no one is still inside. After that—”

“I’ve just learned that Vejay is unaccounted for,” the man said. “Apparently he is buried. Niobe is here.”

“All right. After Niobe has entered your quarters and seen you depart from the station, she will tell us so. We will then land and take you prisoner. Tweed is to further order you, in the hearing of Niobe and anyone else she wants with her, that you are not to harm anyone, now or in the future.

“In return for this, you and your clones will be allowed to live, as long as you stick to your orders. Tweed will be given one month to get away from Luna, to do whatever he planned to do to get underground if he was discovered.”

“How do we know you’ll keep your word about not killing us?” Vaffa said. For the first time, he sounded worried, and Cathay slapped Lilo on the shoulder. Lilo grinned back at him.

“Obviously you can’t be sure. You’ll have to take my word for it. But your alternative is certain death, if an Eight Worlds ship is brought here in response to what we have to say, or if you harm the prisoners. Understand, we
will
broadcast if we have to. If Tweed won’t accept our terms, it means all the people down there will be killed by you, anyway, so there’s nothing for us to lose. This way you have a chance to live, too.

“Tweed’s alternative is simple, too. He has exactly one hundred and fifteen minutes from right now to comply with our demands. If we don’t hear from Niobe in that time, we start talking.”

“We’re calling him,” Vaffa said. “I have only one more question. How do I know you’re telling the truth about knocking Poseidon out of its orbit? How could I tell that?”

“Uh…I guess I can’t prove it’s not a bluff. But it doesn’t change anything. The broadcast goes out in one hundred and fourteen minutes.”

“Very well.” There was a pause. “I suspect you’re telling the truth about that. It was quite a jolt.”

Lilo sat back again. She was sweating. She looked at Cathay, found herself hoping for his approval.

“How’d I do?”

“I thought it was pretty good,” he said. It was sinking in on him now that they were really committed. His son was down there, out of his reach, dependent on Tweed’s decision. “What if he does something else? I almost wish we hadn’t done it. It’s…it’s such a responsibility.”

Lilo reached over and touched him, gently. She knew she didn’t have as much at stake as he did, and yet it was very important to her that the trick work. Her initial dislike of Cathay had faded as she came around to his way of thinking, as his interests began to coincide more easily with hers. On the trip from Saturn, they had
grown close. She was anxious to meet his son, who was supposed to have been her clone’s best friend. She hoped she would get the chance.

“What can he do?” she said. “We’ve gone over it a million times.”

“I know. I just get scared he’s got some trick.”

“Look. When Tweed gets the message from Vaffa, he’s got two hours. A couple minutes to make up his mind, forty-eight minutes for his answer to get to us, then another forty-eight before our broadcast could reach Luna. He’s a
public figure.
The police computers know where he is, because he’s an assassination target. If he drops out of sight quickly, with no notice, the whole machinery will be looking for him in sixty seconds.”

“But he must have prepared something. He knew I’m out here, with a radio, and could blow the whistle on him anytime.”

“But he knew you wouldn’t. He felt safe enough about that, because if you did, it would kill your son.”

Cathay was shaking now, and Lilo stroked his shoulder. The control cabin of the tug was too cramped for them to even turn to face each other, but she managed to kiss his cheek.

“Tweed doesn’t have a choice,” Lilo said. “If he doesn’t do what we told him to, he’ll have only two hours to get so far underground that the kind of massive search we could stir up won’t be able to find him. I just don’t think he can do that.”

“But could we really broadcast?” Cathay was in increasing agony now. It was going to be a long two hours.

Lilo said nothing. The choices were really out of their control now; had been since
Vengeance
smashed in. If they didn’t get confirmation from Niobe in two hours it would mean that things too ghastly to think about were happening on Poseidon.

And then they damn well would broadcast.

Tweed was a familiar figure in the public ways of

King City, and he had always loved it. The sight of him lumbering down Clarke Boulevard was beloved by most of his former constituents. Some days he would waddle aimlessly and amiably, pressing the flesh, with a smile and a pat on the back for all.

But the love of the people sometimes had to be kept at arm’s length. One had to hobnob to keep winning mandates at the polls. On the other hand, there were times when it was necessary to move freely without being mobbed. His hat was the signal. If it was in his hand, they could feel free to talk to him. When he was wearing it, it was understood that he was busy on the people’s business.

Hat firmly on his head, Boss Tweed pounded down the center of the corridor, implacable as a rhinoceros, spouting blue clouds of smoke from his cigar.

He turned corners with the ponderous grace of a tugboat, gradually working his way into less frequented parts of the city. There was an anonymous door at the end of a deserted stretch of corridor. It opened to his palmprint; he stepped into a small room and sealed the door behind him. At the press of a button, the room began a slow descent.

Off came the black and gray coat, the baggy pants, the shoes of hardened leather, the white spats. Soon he stood naked in front of a pile of clothes. Without his shoes he was nine centimeters shorter, but he was still a big man.

He did something to his face and the sagging jowls sagged even further, dropped, and fell into his hands. They were warm to the touch, made from a plastic that sat on the borderline between living and dead material. He dropped the two quivering masses onto the pile of clothes, onto the stovepipe hat he had worn every day for fifty years. The hat collapsed on itself.

For a moment he stood staring down at the pile of clothes, and he began to shake.

“No,” he said. “No, this isn’t the end. It’s just a setback.” He leaned against the wall behind him and waited for the fit of weakness to pass. With his face
buried in his hands, more scraps of plastiflesh peeled away. When he finally looked up, his sense of purpose restored, he was a different person. He had shed thirty years of apparent age, along with the subtle gestalt of lines and protrusions that had marked his face as that of a male human being. He was androgynous now; his huge paunch could not conceal the fact that he had no genital organs. Two swellings on his chest could have belonged to a woman or a very fat man.

He heaved himself erect. With a wet slithering sound, twenty-five kilos of rubbery plastiflesh fell from his belly, his arms and legs, and his buttocks. The breasts remained, jutting out over a flat stomach he had not seen in fifty years.

Tweed was now outwardly a female, but a close examination of the labial folds hidden under the triangle of pubic hair would have revealed no vaginal opening. No hormones raged through Tweed’s body, nothing that could divert him from his purpose. He had decided on neutrality long ago, and had never regretted it. Now, it was going to help save his life. The first step in adopting a new identity was radical cosmetic surgery, usually involving a sex change. That alone would never be enough to turn the trick, but it was an essential first step. He had just accomplished it in record time, as he had planned long ago if it ever came to this.

“Came to this…” he muttered. Again he felt weak. He staggered, and nearly fell on the slippery floor. The plastiflesh had dissolved, and so had the clothes. The water and gray sludge left behind by the disintegration was sucked into a drain in the floor.

He thought back over the years since the first glimmerings of the vision, the future of a liberated Earth. He knew there were those who thought him an opportunist, who felt he was just cashing in on a vein of opinion which had been growing in Luna for a century. But he was sincere.

Tweed had been sincere enough to take his only son and carefully raise him to be a killer, a follower of orders no matter what those orders might be. He had
pored over ancient books for a year before trying it, but he had raised a soldier. The methods of the U.S. Marines and the Red Army had worked admirably, combined with drug therapy and behavioral psychology. Vaffa had never disappointed him, except for a lingering sadness that he and his clone brothers and sisters had been such dull company.

It would be a scandal, all right. Even with the month’s grace period, things would begin to come out as soon as it was clear that Tweed had actually disappeared. People would be looking for him, computer search programs narrowing down on him, at first with concern for his safety. Later, when questions started to be asked, things would start to come to light. Vaffa would be the first of those things, but there would be more. There were two Vaffas still on Luna, and no chance to do anything about them.

Now he faced the nearly impossible struggle to reestablish himself as a data-banked citizen with a right of life. He could no longer be Boss Tweed. He had to fit himself into the cracks between the integrated circuits, the very task he had set for a dozen condemned criminals as their only alternative to working for him. It could be done—party members were in key positions in many of the most powerful computers—but it would take time.

“It’s just a setback,” Tweed said again.

But did it have to be? His/her new face frowned deeply as once more the facts were reviewed. There was still time to countermand the orders to Vaffa, but it was running out. The face contorted, and she/he slammed a fist into the wall. Lilo!

Tweed had always known, down deep, that with the kind of chances he/she was taking it was inevitable that one day someone would make it to freedom. Then, a few months ago, that call from Pluto. Lilo, dictating through Vaffa, telling Tweed what he had to do. It had galled him, but he really had no choice. Now this final blow, and again it came from Lilo. But which one? The teacher, Cathay, had dropped the pilot of the tug close
to Poseidon after he took possession of the ship. The man had said Cathay was alone in the ship, that Lilo had fallen into the hole, or into Jupiter. How had she come back to do this?

Tweed remembered now that Lilo had a base in the Ring. It had to be that one. The other one was dead. She took a vicious satisfaction in the thought. The communicator was in her hand, ready to link with the relay station and tell Vaffa to kill them all. She stopped with her thumb on the button.

Two hours. That’s how long there would be if the order was given. In two hours Lilo would be telling everything, and all the police in the system would be after Tweed. Could it be done? She had tricks Lilo had never heard of; the sex change alone would leave a false trail that might confuse the authorities for as long as three or four hours.

But that assumed no one was looking for her yet. If she gave the order to Vaffa now, the pursuit would start in two hours. And it would be literally snapping at her heels. She ran her thumbnail around the transmit button.

No. She needed a few days to get far ahead of them. In four days—in two, with luck—she would be someone else, with a personal history going back seventy years and all properly logged in the data banks. Boss Tweed was dead, and the new woman he had become yearned to avenge him. But it would be too costly. She must always think of the long term. In two or three years she would be back. She would be someone else this time, but it would not be like starting from scratch. The Free Earth Party would go on, and she would lead it.