The Past Through Tomorrow Part 81

"Shucks," complained Lazarus, "you know I wouldn't ever do anything like that. Anyhow, here I am and here's what I've done so far-" He told them of the Chili and of his reconnaissance of the New Frontiers. "Now here's how I see it: sometime this weekend, while the New Frontiers is sitting out there with n.o.body inboard her, I set the Chili down in the prison reservation, we load up in a hurry, rush out to the New Frontiers, grab her, and scoot. Mr. Administrator, that calls for a lot of help from you. Your proctors will have to look the other way while I land and load. Then we need to sort of slide past the traffic patrol. After that it would be a whole lot better if no naval craft was in a position to do anything drastic about the New Frontiers-if there is a communication watch left in her, they may be able to holler for help before we can silence them."

"Give me credit for some foresight," Ford answered sourly. "I know you will have to have a diversion to stand any chance of getting away with it. The scheme is fantastic at the best."

"Not too fantastic," Lazarus disagreed, "if you are willing to use your emergency powers to the limit at the last minute."

"Possibly. But we can't wait four days." "Why not?'

"The situation won't hold together that long."

"Neither will mine," put in Barstow.

Lazarus looked from one to the other. "Huh? What's the trouble? What's up?"

They explained: Ford and Barstow were engaged in a preposterously improbable task, that of putting over a complex and subtle fraud; a triple fraud with a different face for the Families, for the public, and for the Federation Council. Each aspect presented unique and apparently insurmountable difficulties.

Ford had no one whom he dared take into his confidence, for even his most trusted personal staff member might be infected with the mania of the delusional Fountain of Youth . . . or might not be, but there was no way to know without compromising the conspiracy. Despite this, he had to convince the Council that the measures he was taking were the best for achieving the Council's purpose.

Besides that, he had to hand out daily news releases to convince the citizens that their government was just about to gain for them the "secret" of living forever. Each day the statements had to be more detailed, the lies more tricky. The people were getting restless at the delay; they were sloughing off the coat of civilization, becoming mob.

The Council was feeling the pressure of the people. Twice Ford had been forced to a vote of confidence; the second he had won by only two votes. "I won't win another one-we've got to move."

Barstow's troubles were different but just as sticky. He had to have confederates, because his job was to prepare all the hundred thousand members for the exodus. They had to know, before the time came to embark, if they were to leave quietly and quickly. Nevertheless he did not dare tell them the truth too soon because among so many people there were bound to be some who were stupid and stubborn . . . and it required just one fool to wreck the scheme by spilling it to the proctors guarding them.

Instead he was forced to try to find leaders who he could trust, convince them, and depend on them to convince others. He needed almost a thousand dependable "herdsmen" to be sure of getting his people to follow him when the time came. Yet the very number of confederates he needed was so great as to make certain that somebody would prove weak.

Worse than that, he needed other confederates for a still touchier purpose. Ford and he had agreed on a scheme, weak at best, for gaining time. They were doling out the techniques used by the Families in delaying the symptoms of senility under the pretense that the sum total of these techniques was the "secret." To put over this fraud Barstow had to have the help of the biochemists, gland therapists, specialists in symbiotics and in metabolism, and other experts among the Families, and these in turn had to be prepared for police interrogation by the Families' most skilled psychotechnicians . . . because they had to be able to put over the fraud even under the influence of babble drugs. The hypnotic false indoctrination required for this was enormously more complex than that necessary for a simple block against talking. Thus far the swindle had worked . . . fairly well. But the discrepancies became more hard to explain each day.

Barstow could not keep these matters juggled much longer. The great ma.s.s of the Families, necessarily kept in ignorance, were getting out of hand even faster than the public outside. They were rightfully angry at what had been done to them; they expected anyone in authority to do something about it-and do it now!

Barstow's influence over his kin was melting away as fast as that of Ford over the Council.

"It can't be four days," repeated Ford. "More like twelve hours . . . twenty-four at the outside. The Council meets again tomorrow afternoon."

Barstow looked worried. "I'm not sure I can prepare them in so short a time. I may have trouble getting them aboard."

"Don't worry about it," Ford snapped.

"Why not?"

"Because," Ford said bluntly, "any who stay behind will be dead-if they're lucky."

Barstow said nothing and looked away. It was the first time that either one of them had admitted explicitly that this was no relatively harmless piece of political chicanery but a desperate and nearly hopeless attempt to avoid a ma.s.sacre and that Ford himself was on both sides of the fence.

"Well," Lazarus broke in briskly, "now that you boys have settled that, let's get on with it. I can ground the Chili in-" He stopped and estimated quickly where she would be in orbit, how long it would take him to rendezvous. "-well, by twenty-two Greenwich. Add an hour to play safe. How about seventeen o'clock Oklahoma time tomorrow afternoon? That's today, actually."

The other two seemed relieved. "Good enough," agreed Barstow. "I'll have them in the best shape I can manage."

"All right," agreed Ford, "if that's the fastest it can be done." He thought for a moment. "Barstow, I'll withdraw at once all proctors and government personnel now inside thereservation barrier and shut you off. Once the gate contracts, you can tell them all."

"Right. I'll do my best."

"Anything else before we clear?" asked Lazarus. "Oh, yes-Zack, we'd better pick a place for me to land, or I may shorten a lot of lives with my blast."

"Uh, yes. Make your approach from the west. I'll rig a standard berth marker. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Not okay," denied Ford. "We'll have to give him a pilot beam to come in on."

"Nonsense," objected Lazarus. "I could set her down on top of the Washington Monument."

"Not this time, you couldn't. Don't be surprised at the weather."

As Lazarus approached his rendezvous with the Chili he signaled from the gig; the Chili's transponder echoed, to his relief-he had little faith in gear he had not personally overhauled and a long search for the Chili at this point would have been disastrous.

He figured the relative vector, gunned the gig, flipped, and gunned to brake-homed-in three minutes off estimate, feeling smug. He cradled the gig, hurried inside, and took her down.

Entering the stratosphere and circling two-thirds of the globe took no longer than he had estimated. He used part of the hour's leeway he had allowed himself by being very stingy in his maneuvers in order to spare the worn, obsolescent injection meters. Then he was down in the troposphere and making his approach, with skin temperatures high but not dangerously so. Presently he realized what Ford had meant about the weather. Oklahoma and half of Texas were covered with deep, thick clouds. Lazarus was amazed and somehow pleased; it reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to harness the elements. He hoped that their planet-if they found one!-would have some nice, lively weather.

Then he was down in it and too busy to meditate. In spite of her size the freighter bucked and complained. Whew! Ford must have ordered this little charivari the minute the time was set-and, at that, the integrators must have had a big low-pressure area close at hand to build on.

Somewhere a pattern controlman was shouting at him; he switched it off and gave all his attention to his approach radar and the ghostly images in the infra-red rectifier while comparing what they told him with his inertial tracker. The ship pa.s.sed over a miles-wide scar on the landscape-the ruins of the Okla-Orleans Road City. When Lazarus had last seen it, it had been noisy with life. Of all the mechanical monstrosities the human race had saddled themselves with, he mused, those dinosaurs easily took first prize.

Then the thought was cut short by a squeal from his board; the ship had picked up the pilot beam.

He wheeled her in, cut his last jet as she sc.r.a.ped, and slapped a series of switches; the great cargo ports rumbled open and rain beat in.

Eleanor Johnson huddled into herself, half crouching against the storm, and tried to draw her cloak more tightly about the baby in the crook of her left arm. When the storm had first hit, the child had cried endlessly, stretching her nerves taut. Now it was quiet, but that seemed only new cause for alarm.

She herself had wept, although she had tried not to show it. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been exposed to weather like this; it seemed symbolic of the storm that had overturned her life, swept her away from her cherished first home of her own with its homey old-fashioned fireplace, its shiny service cell, its thermostat which she could set to the temperature she liked without consulting others-a tempest which had swept her away between two grim proctors, arrested like some poor psychotic, and landed her after terrifying indignities here in the cold sticky red clay of this Oklahoma field.

Was it true? Could it possibly be true? Or had she not yet borne her baby at all and this was another of the strange dreams she had while carrying it?

But the rain was too wetly cold, the thunder too loud; she could never have slept through such a dream. Then what the Senior Trustee had told them must be true, too-it had to be true; she had seen the ship ground with her own eyes, its blast bright against the black of the storm. She could no longer see it but the crowd around her moved slowly forward; it must in front of her. She was close to the outskirts of the crowd she would be one of the last to get aboard.

It was very necessary to board the ship-Elder Zaccur Barstow had told them with deep solemnness what lay in store for them if they failed to board. She had believed earnestness; nevertheless she wondered how it could possibly be true-could anyone be so wicked, so deeply and terribly wicked as to want to kill anyone as harmless and helpless as herself and her baby?

She was struck by panic terror-suppose there was no room left by the time she got up to the ship? She clutched her baby more tightly; the child cried again at the pressure.

A woman in the crowd moved closer and spoke to her "You must be tired. May I carry the baby for a while?"

"No. No, thank you. I'm all right." A flash of lightning showed the woman's face; Eleanor Johnson recognized her Elder Mary Sperling.

But the kindness of the offer steadied her. She knew now what she must do. If they were filled up and could take no more, she must pa.s.s her baby forward, hand to hand over the heads of the crowd. They could not refuse s.p.a.ce to anything as little as her baby.

Something brushed her in the dark. The crowd was moving forward again.

When Barstow could see that loading would be finished in a few more minutes he left his post at one of the cargo doors and ran as fast as he could through the splashing sticky mud to the communications shack. Ford had warned him to give notice just before they raised ship; it was necessary to Ford's plan for diversion. Barstow fumbled with an awkward un-powered door, swung it open and rushed up. He set the private combination which should connect him directly to Ford's control desk and pushed the key.

He was answered at once but it was not Ford's face on the screen. Barstow burst out with, "Where is the Administrator? I want to talk with him," before he recognized the face in front of him.

It was a face well known to all the public-Bork Vanning, Leader of the Minority in the Council. "You're talking to the Administrator," Vanning said and grinned coldly. "The new Administrator. Now who the devil are you and why are you calling?"

Barstow thanked all G.o.ds, past and present, that recognition was onesided. He cut the connection with one unaimed blow and plunged out of the building.

Two cargo ports were already closed; stragglers were moving through the other two. Barstow hurried the last of them inside with curses and followed them, slammed pell-mell to the control room. "Raise ship!" he shouted to Lazarus. "Fast!"

"What's all the shoutin' fer?" asked Lazarus, but he was already closing and sealing the ports. He tripped the acceleration screamer, waited a scant ten seconds . . . and gave her power.

"Well," he said conversationally six minutes later, "I hope everybody was lying down. If not, we've got some broken bones on our hands. What's that you were saying?"

Barstow told him about his attempt to report to Ford.

Lazarus blinked and whistled a few bars of Turkey in the Straw. "It looks like we've run out of minutes. It does look like it." He shut up and gave his attention to his instruments, one eye on his ballistic track, one on radar-aft.

Chapter 7.

LAZARUS HAD his hands full to jockey the Chili into just the right position against the side of the New Frontiers; the overstrained meters made the smaller craft skittish as a young horse. But he did it. The magnetic anchors clanged home; the gas-tight seals slapped into place; and their ears popped as the pressure in the Chili adjusted to that in the giant ship. Lazarus dived for the drop hole in the deck of the control room, pulled himself rapidly hand over hand to the port of contact, and reached the pa.s.senger lock of the New Frontiers to find himself facing the skipper-engineer.

The man looked at him and snorted. "You again, eh? Why the deuce didn't you answer our challenge? You can't lock onto us without permission; this is private property. What do you mean by it?"

"It means," said Lazarus, "that you and your boys are going back to Earth a few days early-in this ship."

"Why, that's ridiculous!"

"Brother," Lazarus said gently, his blaster suddenly growing out his left fist, "I'd sure hate to hurt you after you were so nice to me . . . but I sure will, unless you knuckle under awful quick."

The official simply stared unbelievingly. Several of his juniors had gathered behind him; one of them sunfished in the air, started to leave. Lazarus winged him in the leg, at low power; he jerked and clutched at nothing. "Now you'll have to take care of him," Lazarus observed.

That settled it. The skipper called together his men from the announcing system microphone at the pa.s.senger lock; Lazarus counted them as they arrived-twenty-nine, a figure he had been careful to learn on his first visit. He a.s.signed two men to hold each of them. Then he took a look at the man he had shot.

"You aren't really hurt, bub," he decided shortly and turned to the skipper-engineer. "Soon as we transfer you, get some radiation salve on that burn. The Red Cross kit's on the after bulkhead of the control room."

"This is piracy! You can't get away with this."

"Probably not," Lazarus agreed thoughtfully. "But I sort of hope we do." He turned his attention back to his job. "Shake it up there! Don't take all day."

The Chili was slowly being emptied. Only the one exit could be used but the pressure of the half hysterical mob behind them forced along those in the bottleneck of the trunk joining the two ships; they came boiling out like bees from a disturbed hive.

Most of them had never been in free fall before this trip; they burst out into the larger s.p.a.ce of the giant ship and drifted helplessly, completely disoriented. Lazarus tried to bring order into it by grabbing anyone he could see who seemed to be able to handle himself in zero gravity, ordered him to speed things up by shoving along the helpless ones-shove them anywhere, on back into the big ship, get them out of the way, make room for the thousands more yet to come. When he had conscripted a dozen or so such herdsmen he spotted Barstow in the emerging throng, grabbed him and put him in charge. "Keep 'em moving, just anyhow. I've got to get for'ard to the control room. If you spot Andy Libby, send him after me."

A man broke loose, from the stream and approached Barstow. "There's a ship trying to lock onto ours. I saw it through a port."

"Where?" demanded Lazarus.

The man was handicapped by slight knowledge of ships and shipboard terms, but he managed to make himself understood. "I'll be back," Lazarus told Barstow. "Keep 'em moving-and don't let any of those babies get away-our guests there." He holstered his blaster and fought his way back through the swirling mob in the bottleneck.

Number three port seemed to be the one the man had meant. Yes, there was something there. The port had an armor-gla.s.s bull's-eye in it, but instead of stars beyond Lazarus saw a lighted s.p.a.ce. A ship of some sort had locked against it.

Its occupants either had not tried to open the Chili's port or just possibly did not know how. The port was not locked from the inside; there had been no reason to bother. It should have opened easily from either side once pressure was balanced . . . which the tell-tale, shining green by the latch, showed to be the case.

Lazarus was mystified.

Whether it was a traffic control vessel, a Naval craft, or something else, its presence was bad news. But why didn't, they simply open the door and walk in? He was tempted to lock the port from the inside, hurry and lock all the others, finish loading and try to run for it.

But his monkey ancestry got the better of him; he could not leave alone something he did not understand. So he compromised by kicking the blind latch into place that would keep them from opening the port from outside, then slithered cautiously alongside the bull's-eye and sneaked a peep with one eye.

He found himself staring at Slayton Ford.

He pulled himself to one side, kicked the blind latch open, pressed the switch to open the port. He waited there, a toe caught in a handihold, blaster in one hand, knife in the other.

One figure emerged. Lazarus saw that it was Ford, pressed the switch again to close the port, kicked the blind latch into place, while never taking his blaster off his visitor. "Now what the h.e.l.l?" he demanded. "What are you doing here? And who else is here? Patrol?"

"I'm alone."

"Huh?"

"I want to go with you . . . if you'll have me."

Lazarus looked at him and did not answer. Then he went back to the bull's-eye and inspected all that he could see. Ford appeared to be telling the truth, for no one else was in sight. But that was not what held Lazarus' eye.

Why the ship wasn't a proper deep-s.p.a.ce craft at all. It did not have an air1ock but merely a seal to let it fasten to a larger ship; Lazarus was staring right into the body of the craft. It looked like-yes, it was a "Joy-boat Junior," a little private strato-yacht, suitable only for point-to-point trajectory, or at the most for rendezvous with a satellite provided the satellite could refuel it for the return leg.

There was no fuel for it here. A lightning pilot possibly could land that tin toy without power and still walk away from it provided he had the skill to play Skip-to-M'Lou in and out of the atmosphere while nursing his skin temperatures-but Lazarus wouldn't want to try it. No, sir! He turned to Ford. "Suppose we turned you down. How did you figure on getting back?"

"I didn't figure on it," Ford answered simply.

"Mmm-- Tell me about it, but make it march; we're minus on minutes."

Ford had burned all bridges. Turned out of office only hours earlier, he had known that, once all the facts came out, life-long imprisonment in Coventry was the best he could hope for-if he managed to avoid mob violence or mindshattering interrogation.

Arranging the diversion was the thing that finally lost him his thin margin of control. His explanations for his actions were not convincing to the Council. He had excused the storm and the withdrawing of proctors from the reservation as a drastic attempt to break the morale of the Families-a possible excuse but not too plausible. His orders to Naval craft, intended to keep them away from the New Frontiers, had apparently not been a.s.sociated in anyone's mind with the Howard Families affair; nevertheless the apparent lack of sound reason behind them had been seized on by the opposition as another weapon to bring him down. They were watching for anything to catch him out-one question asked in Council concerned certain monies from the Administrator's discretionary fund which had been paid indirectly to one Captain Aaron Sheffield; were these monies in fact expended in the public interest?

Lazarus' eyes widened. "You mean they were onto me?"

"Not quite. Or you wouldn't be here. But they were close behind you. I think they must have had help from a lot of my people at the last."

"Probably. But we made it, so let's not fret. Come on. The minute everybody is out of this ship and into the big girl, we've got to boost." Lazarus turned to leave.

"You're going to let me go along?"

Lazarus checked his progress, twisted to face Ford. "How else?" He had intended at first to send Ford down in the Chili. It was not grat.i.tude that changed his mind, but respect. Once he had lost office Ford had gone straight to Huxley Field north of Novak Tower, cleared for the vacation satellite Monte Carlo, and had jumped for the New Frontiers instead. Lazarus liked that. "Go for broke" took courage and character that most people didn't have. Don't grab a toothbrush, don't wind the cat-just do it! "Of course you're coming along," he said easily: "You're my kind of boy, Slayton."

The Chili was more than half emptied now but the s.p.a.ces near the interchange were still jammed with frantic mobs. Lazarus cuffed and shoved his way through, trying not to bruise women and children unnecessarily but not letting the possibility slow him up. He scrambled through the connecting trunk with Ford hanging onto his belt, pulled aside once they were through and paused in front of Barstow.

Barstow stared past him. "Yeah, it's him," Lazarus confirmed. "Don't stare-it's rude. He's going with us. Have you seen Libby?"

"Here I am, Lazarus." Libby separated himself from the throng and approached with the ease of a veteran long used to free fall. He had a small satchel strapped to one wrist.