To the Stars Trilogy Part 15

She pursed her lips in concentration-then smiled. "Ohh, ajoke. Very good." The smile vanished. "It is impor-tant I call because you must return to London at once. This is a necessity."

"I'm not really finished here."

"I am sorry. But you will have to leave the work. It is hard to explain."

Jan had the sudden cold feeling that this was not her doing, that she had been ordered to recall him. He did not want to press her. 'All right then. I'll get through to shuttle control and call you back..."

"That will not be needed. The flight leaves in about two hours and you have been booked on it. There will be time?"

"Yes, just about. I'll phone you as soon as I get in."

Jan broke the connection and turned on the lights, yawning and rubbing his p.r.i.c.kly face. Somebody wanted him out of the station and back to London in a hurry. It had to be Security. But why? The answer seemed obvious enough. Men just don't disappear in s.p.a.ce. Yet one had. Could it be that? He had the rather unhappy sensation that it was.

The return flight was an easy on~he was well adjusted to the sensation of free fall by now and he felt strangely heavy when he walked down the ramp on Earth. In a few days he had become used to the reduced gravity of the station. The Atlantic flight was equally uneventful, he slept most of the way. His eyes were gritty but he felt rested when he climbed from the plane in Heathrow. Outside was the world of weather again and he hurried, shivering, to his waiting car where the attendant had left it. The thaw had finally set in and the snow was turning to slush. It still felt cold to someone acclimatized to a controlled environment. His coat was in the boot and he quickly pulled it on.

When he entered his apartment the first thing he noticed was the MESSAGE WAITING light on the phone. He thumbed the b.u.t.ton and read the display on the screen:

I WILL BE WAITING IN Mv OFFICE. SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU ARRIVE.

THURGOOD-SMVTHE.

It was no less than he expected. But Security, and his brother-in-law, could wait until he had washed and changed and put some decent food inside him. Rations at the station had been frozen, nourishing and boring.

While he was eating, Jan had the sudden thought that there was something else he could do when he saw Smitty. Right in the middle of Security! Dangerous, but hard to resist. 'When he emptied his pockets and changed clothes he managed to pick up a small device that he had constructed with some labor. Now he would find out how well it worked.

Security Central was a great, gray complex of windowless concrete buildings stretched along the north side of Marylebone. Jan had been there before and the central computer carefully remembered this fact.

When he slipped his ID into the slot before the garage door, it returned it instantly to his hand and rolled open the door. He left the car in the visitors' bay and entered the lift which took him, under its own control, to the reception floor.

"Good afternoon, Engineer Kulozik," the girl behind the ma.s.sive desk said, glancing at her screen. "If you will kindly take lift three."

He nodded and stepped through the security arch. There was a quiet buzzing and the guard looked up from the controls.

"Would you please step over here, your honor," he said..

This had never happened before. Jan felt a sudden coldness that he had to hide from the guard.

"What's wrong with the machine?" he asked. "i'm not carrying a gun."

"Sorry, sir. Something metallic in that pocket there. If you please."

Why had he brought it? What criminal bit of stupidity had led him to this folly? Jan put his hand slowly into his pocket and took out the device he had made and held it out before him.

"Is this what you mean?" he said.

The guard looked at the glow lighter and nodded. "Yes, sir. That's it. Lighters don't usually trip the alarm."

He bent to look carefully at it, reached for it. Jan stopped breathing. Then the man dropped his hand.

"Must be the gold plating. Sorry to bother you, sir."

Jan put his hand and the lighter into his pocket and nodded-he couldn't risk saying a word-and walked on to the open doors of the lift. They closed behind him and he relaxed, letting the lighter drop from his clenched fist. Close, entirely too close. He could not risk detection now by actuating the circuitry he had built into it. Far too dangerous.

Thurgood-Smythe sat behind the desk, unsmiling, and only nodded coldly when Jan entered. Uninvited, Jan dropped into an armchair and crossed his legs as casually as he could. "What's all this about?" he asked.

"I have a feeling you are getting into very deep trouble."

"I have the feeling that I don't know what the h.e.l.l you are talking about."

Thurgood-Smythe leveled a finger like a gun, grimly angry.

"Don't try to play games with me, Jan. There's been another one of those coincidences. Soon after you arrived at Station Twelve a crewman vanished from one of the s.p.a.cers.

"So? Do you think I had anything to do with it?"

"Normally I would not know or care. But the man was one of ours."

"Security? I can see why you're concerned."

"Can you? It is not that man but you I am concerned about." He counted slowly on his fingers. "You have access to a terminal involved in illegal tapping. Then you happen to be in Scotland during trouble at a camp. And now you are present at the time a man disappears. I don't like it."

"Coincidence. You said so yourself."

"No. I don't believe in coincidence. You are involved in security violations..."

"Listen, Smitty-you can't accuse me like that, without any evidence..."

"I don't need evidence." Thurgood-Smythe's voice had the coldness of death in it. "If you weren't my wife's brother I would have you arrested on the spot. Taken out of here and sent to interrogation and-if you lived-to a camp. For life. As far as the world would know you would simply vanish from the public files, your bank account would cease to exist, your apartment would be empty."

"You could-Ao this?"

"I have done it," was ~he flat and overwhelming answer.

"I can't believe it-it's horrible. On your word alone-where is justice..."

"Jan. You are stupid. There is only as much justice in the world as those who are in control of the world care to permit, to enable affairs to run smoothly. Inside this building there is no justice. None at all. Do you under-stand what I am saying?"

"I understand, but I can't believe it could be true. You are saying that life as I know it is not real..."

"It isn't. And I don't expect you to take my word for it. Words are just words. Therefore I have arranged a graphic demonstration for you. Something you cannot argue with."

Thurgood-Smythe pressed a b.u.t.ton on his desk as he talked and the door opened. A uniformed policeman led in a man in gray prison garb, stopped him by the desk, then exited. The man just stood there, staring unseeing into s.p.a.ce, the skin of his face limp and hanging, his eyes empty.

"Condemned to death for drug offences," Thurgood-Smythe said. 'A creature like this is useless to society."

"He's a man, not a creature."

"He's a creature now. Cortical erasure before execu-tion. He has no consciousness, no memory, no personality. Just flesh. Now we remove the flesh."

Jan gripped the chair arms, unable to speak, as his brother-in-law removed a metal case from his desk drawer. It had an insulated handle and two metal prods on the front. He walked over and stood in front of the prisoner, pressed the prods to the man's forehead, and thumbed the trigger in the handle.

The man's limbs jerked once in painful sudden con-vulsion, then he dropped to the floor.

"Thirty thousand volts," Thurgood-Smythe said, turn-ing to face Jan. His voice was toneless, empty of expres-sion as he walked across the room and held the electrical device before Jan. "It might just as well have been you. It could be you-right now. Do you still not understand what I am saying?"

Jan looked with horrified fascination at the metal prods just before his face, their ends blackened and pitted. They moved closer and he recoiled involuntarily. At that moment, for the very first time, he was suddenly very frightened for himselL And for this world that he lived in. Up until now he had only been involved in a complicated game. Others could get hurt, he never would. Now the realization struck him that the rules he had always played by didn't exist. He was no longer playing. Now it was all for real. The games were over.

"Yes," he said, and his voice was hoa.r.s.e. "Yes, Mr Thurgood-Smythe, I understand what you are saying." He spoke very quietly, barely above a whisper. "This is not an argument or a discussion." He glanced down at the body sprawled on the floor. "There is something you want to tell me, isn't there?

Something that you want me to d~ that I am going to do."

"You are correct."

Thurgood-Smythe returned to his desk and put the instrument awaY. The door opened and the same police-man entered and dragged out the corpse. Horribly, by the legs b.u.mping the limp head across the floor. Jan turned his eyes away from it, back to his brother-in-law as he spoke.

"For Elizabeth's sake, and for that reason alone, I am not going to ask you how deeply you are involved with the reslstance-although I know you are. You ignored my ad-vIce, now you will obey my instructions. You will leave here and cease any contact, stop any activity. Forever. If you fall under suspicion again, are involved in any way with illegal actl~ity-from that moment onward I will do nothing to you. You will be arrested on the spot, brought hPeroretect, interrogated, then imprisoned for life. Is that clear?"

"Clear."

"Louder. I did not hear you."

"Clear. Yes, clear, I understand."

thioown As Jan said the words he found a terrible anger driving out the fear. In this moment of absolute humilia-he realized how loathsome the people in power were, impossible it would be to live with them in peace after this discovery. He did not want to die-but he knew he would never be able to live in a world where the Thurgood-Smythes were in charge. His shoulders slumped, and he lowered his face. Not in surrender, but only so that his brother-in-law would not see the rage, the anger that he felt.

His hands were thrust deep into his jacket pockets.

He depressed the b.u.t.ton on the glow lighter.

The command signal radiated from the small but powerful transmitter inside. This activated the device conceale4 in the pen, clearly visible in the Security man's pocket. Upon receipt of this signal the memory bank was emptied and transmitted to the memory in the lighter. It took only microseconds. Jan let go of the b.u.t.ton and stood up.

"Is there anything else~)r can I go now?"

"It is for your own good, Jan. I gain nothing by this."

"Smitty, please. Be anything-bot don't be a hypo-crite." Jan couldn't prevent it; some of the anger leaked through. Thurgood-Smythe must have been expecting it because he only nodded expressionlessly.

Jan had a sud-den realization.

'And you hate my guts, don't yoti?" he said. 'And you always have."

"That is absolutely true."

"Well-very good. The feeling is absolutely mutual."

Jan left then, not daring to say another word, afraid that he would go too far. He had no trouble leaving the building. Only when he was driving up the ramp did he realize what this meant.

He had gotten away with it. He had a recording in his pocket of all his brother-in-law's top Security conversations of the past weeks.

It was like carrying a bomb that could destroy him. What should he do with it? Wipe it clean, then throw the lighter into the Thames and forget forever what he had done. Automatically he turned the car toward the river. If he did anything other than this, it would be the utmost folly, a self-imposed death sentence.

The thoughts chased themselves through his head one after another and he could not think clearly. He almost ran through a red light that he did not see, would have run it if the car's computer had not caught his dereliction of duty and applied the brakes.

This was the sticking point, he realized. This was the moment when he determined what the rest of his life would be like.

He pulled the car into Savoy Street and braked to a stop, too occupied to drive. Nor could he sit still.

He climbed out and locked the car, and started for the river. Then stopped. No, he hadn't made his mind up yet, that was the worst part. He still didn't know what he should do. He unlocked the trunk and rummaged in his tool box there until he found a pair of small earphones; he stuffed them into his pocket and turned toward the river.

A raw wind had sprung up and the slush was turning into rutted ice again. Other than a few distant, hurrying figures, he had the Victoria Embankment to himself. He stood at the stone rail, staring unseeingly at the ice floes in the gray water hurrying toward the sea. The lighter was in his hand. All he had to do was pull it out and throw it from him and the indecision would be over. He took it out and looked at it.

So small, as tiny as a man 5 life.

With his other hand he plugged the earphones into the opening in its base.

He could still throw the thing away. But he had to hear what Thurgood-Smythe said in the security of his office, when talking to others of his kind. He had to know at least that much.

The tiny voices sounded in the privacy of his ear. Incomprehensible for the most part, conversations about matters, names he didn't know, complicated affairs discussed in a cold and businesslike way. The experts could have a field day with this, would be able to unravel and make sense of all the references and commands. It made hardly any sense at all to Jan. He jumped to the ending and caught some of their own conversation, then jumped back earlier in the day. Nothing of any real interest. Then he froze as the words sounded clearly: "Yes, that's right, the Israeli girl. We've had enough trouble from her and we are going to finish it tonight.

Wait until the meeting in the ca.n.a.l boat is under way and then..."

Sara-in danger!

Jan made the decision-unaware at the moment that he had even decided. He hurried, not running, that would be noticed, back to his car through the growing dusk. This evening-tonight! Could he get there first?

He drove coldly and carefully, making the best time possible. The ca.n.a.l boat. It must be the one on the Regent's Ca.n.a.l where they had met last time. How much did Security know? How did they know it?

How long had they been watching their every move, toying with them? It didn't matter. He had to save Sara. Save her even if he did not save himself. She came first. The car hghts came on as the sky darkened.

He must plan. Think before he acted. This car was probably sound bugged, so he had to treat it as if it were bugged. If he drove directly to Little Venice the alarm would be given at once. He would have to go part of the way on foot. There was a shopping complex on Maida Vale that would do. He drove in and parked and went into the largest shop. Through it and out the door on the far side, walking fast.

It was dark when he reached the ca.n.a.l. The lights were on along the towpath and a couple were walking toward him. He drew back into the shadowed protection of the trees and let them go by. Only when they had turned out of sight did he hurry to the ca.n.a.l boat. It was tied in the same place, dark and silent. A man stepped out of the shadows when he climbed aboard.

"I wouldn't go in there if I were you.

"Fryer, I have to, it's an emergency."

"No way, old son, a very private meeting going on..."

Jan struck Fryer's hand from his shoulder, pushed him away so that he stumbled and fell. Then Jan had the door open and was jumping down into the cabin.

Sara looked up, eyes wide with surprise as he burst in.

So did Sonia Amarigho, the head of the satellite laboratories who was sitting across the table from her.