Prisoners of Tomorrow (84 page)

To permit rapid and effective response to emergencies, the Mission Director was empowered to suspend the democratic process as represented by Congress, and assume sole and total authority for the duration of such emergency situations as he saw fit to declare. Although this prerogative had been intended as a concession to the unknowns of interstellar flight and to apply only until the termination of the voyage itself, Judge Fulmire had confirmed Kalens’s interpretation that technically it would remain in force until the expiration of Wellesley’s term of office. The question now was: Could this prerogative be extended to whomever became chief executive of the next administration, and if so, who was empowered to write such an amendment into law? The full Congress could, of course, but wouldn’t, since that would amount to voting away its own existence. Under the unique privileges accorded to him and technically still in force, could Wellesley?

Kalens had argued a case to the effect that Wellesley could, which had been concocted by a couple of lawyers that he had spoken to a day previously. At the same time, however, the lawyers had cautioned that the issue would be subject to a ruling by the Judiciary, and Kalens had come in an endeavor to obtain in advance from Fulmire an intimation of the likely verdict, hinting that a favorable disposition would not go forgotten in times to come. The endeavor had backfired spectacularly.

“I will not be a party to such shenanigans!” the Judge exclaimed. “This is all highly irregular, as you well know. A ruling must be subject to all due process, and only to all due process. There the matter must remain. What you are asking is inexcusable.”

“Our own people have a right to expect the protection of a properly constituted legal system, and this planet fails even to possess one,” Kalens argued. “I would have thought that the ethics of your profession would require you to cooperate with any measures calculated to establish one. The purpose of this provision is precisely that.”

“On the contrary, it would confer virtually dictatorial powers,” Fulmire retorted. “There can be no validity in a legality established by illegal means.”

“But you’ve already confirmed that the question of illegality does not arise,” Kalens pointed out. “The emergency clauses apply until the elections have been held.”

“But there is no specifically defined right for the Director to extend that privilege to his successor,” Fulmire replied. “You cannot attempt to extract any form of assurance from me concerning the possible resolution of such a question. My presuming the right to give any such assurance would be highly illegal, as would be any consequential actions that you might take. I repeat, I have no more to say.”

“Then invoke the security provisions,” Borftein said, shifting in his chair from weariness with the whole business. “It’s a security matter, isn’t it? The Chironians have left it to us by default, and it’s their security at stake as well as ours. The Pagoda’s only two years away. Somebody’s got to take the helm in all this.”

Fulmire gestured over the books and documents spread across his desk. “The security provisions provide for Congress to vote exceptional powers to the Directorate in the event of demonstrable security demands, and for the Directorate to delegate extraordinary duties to the chief executive once
they
are voted that power. They do not provide for the chief executive to assume such duties for himself, and therefore neither can he do so for his successor.”

A short silence fell, and the deadlock persisted. Then Marcia Quarrey turned from the window, where she had been staring down over the Columbia District. “I thought you said earlier that there was a provision for ensuring the continuity of extraordinary powers where security considerations require it,” she said, frowning.

“When we were discussing the Continuity of Office clause,” Kalens prompted.

Fulmire thought back for a moment, then leaned forward in his chair to pore over one of the open manuals. “That was under ‘Emergency Situations,’ not ‘Security,’” he said after a few moments, without looking up. “Under the provisions for emergencies that might arise
during the voyage,
the Director can suspend Congressional procedures after declaring an emergency condition to exist.”

“Yes, we know that,” Quarrey agreed. “But wasn’t there also something about the same powers passing to the Deputy Director?”

Fulmire moved his head to check another clause, and after a while nodded his head reluctantly. “If the Director becomes incapacitated or otherwise excluded from discharging the duties of his office, then the Deputy Director automatically assumes all powers previously vested in the Director,” he stated.

Kalens raised his head sharply. “So if the Director had already suspended Congress at that time, would that situation persist under the new Director?” He thought for a moment, then added, “I would assume it must, surely. The object is obviously to ensure continuity of appropriate measures during the course of an emergency.”

Fulmire looked uneasy but in the end was forced to nod his agreement. “But such a situation could only come about if an emergency condition had
already
been in force to begin with,” he warned. “It could not be applied in any way to the present circumstances.”

“You don’t think that a ship full of Asiatics coming at us armed to the teeth qualifies as an emergency?” Borftein asked sarcastically.

“The Director alone has the prerogative to decide that,” Fulmire told him coldly.

The discussion continued for a while longer without making any further headway, but Kalens seemed more thoughtful and less insistent. Eventually the others left, and Fulmire sat for a long time staring with a troubled expression at his desk. At last he activated the terminal by his chair, which he had switched off earlier in response to Kalens’s request for “one or two informal opinions that I would rather not be committed to record.”

“Which service?” the terminal inquired.

“Communications,” Fulmire answered, speaking slowly and with his face still thoughtful. “Find Paul Lechat for me and put him through if he’s free, would you. And route this via a secured channel.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“The thing I still can’t understand is what motivates these people,” Colman remarked to Hanlon as they walked with Jay to Adam’s house. “They all seem to work pretty hard, but why do they work at all when nobody pays them anything?”

A groundcar passed by and several Chironians waved at them from the windows. “It can’t be quite like that,” Jay said. “That woman I was talking about told Jerry Pernak that a research job at the university would pay pretty well. That must have meant something.”

“Well, it sure doesn’t pay any money.” Colman turned his head toward Hanlon. “What do you say, Bret?”

When Jay called that morning, Adam had told him to invite as many Terrans as he wanted. Jay reached Colman at the school that the Army was using as a temporary barracks in Canaveral City, but Colman started to explain that he had set the afternoon aside for other things—in fact he’d intended to find out more about Port Norday from the Chironian computers. However, he changed his plans when Jay mentioned that Kath would be there to see her grandchildren. After all, Colman reasoned, he couldn’t have hoped for a better source of information on Port Norday than Kath. As Hanlon was off duty, Colman had invited him along too.

“I hope you’re not expecting an answer,” Hanlon said. “It makes about as much sense to me as Greek. . . .” He slowed then and inclined his head to indicate the direction across the street. “Now, there’s the fella you should be asking,” he suggested.

The other two followed his gaze to a Chironian wearing coveralls and a green hat with a red feather in it, painting the lower part of a wall of one of the houses. Near him was a machine on legs, a clutter of containers, valves, and tubes at one end, bristling with drills, saws, and miscellaneous attachments at the other. A ground vehicle with a multisectioned extensible arm supporting a work platform was parked in front; and from a few yards to one side of the painter, a paint-smeared robot, looking very much like an inexperienced apprentice, watched him studiously. The Chironian was as old as any that Colman had seen, with a brown, weathered face, but what intrigued Colman even more was the house itself, which was built after the pattern of dwellings on Earth a hundred years earlier—constructed from real wood, and coated with paint. It was not the first such anachronism that he had seen in Franklin, where designs three centuries old coexisted quite happily alongside maglev cars and genetically modified plants, but he hadn’t had an opportunity to stop and study one before.

The painter glanced across and noticed them watching. “Nice day,” he commented and continued with his work. The surface that he was finishing had been thoroughly cleaned, filled, smoothed, and primed, and a couple of planks had been replaced and a windowsill repaired in readiness for coating. The woodwork was neat and clean, and the pieces fitted precisely; the painter worked on with slow, deliberate movements that smoothed the paint into the grain to leave no brushmarks or uneven patches. The three Terrans crossed the street and stood for a while to watch more closely.

“Nice job you’re doing,” Hanlon remarked at last.

“Glad you think so.” The painter carried on.

“It’s a pretty house,” Hanlon said after another short silence.

“Yep.”

“Yours?”

“Nope.”

“Someone you know?” Colman asked.

“Kind of.” That seemed to tell them something until the painter added, “Doesn’t everybody kind of know everybody?”

Colman and Hanlon frowned at each other. Obviously they weren’t going to get anywhere without being more direct. Hanlon wiped his palms on his hips. “We, ah . . . we don’t mean to be nosy or anything, but out of curiosity, why are you painting it?” he asked.

“Because it needs painting.”

“So why bother?” Jay asked. “What’s it to you if somebody else’s house needs painting or not?”

“I’m a painter,” the painter said over his shoulder. “I like to see a paint job properly done. Why else would anyone do it?” He stepped back, surveyed his work with a critical eye, nodded to himself, and dropped the brush into a flap in his walking workshop, where a claw began spinning it in a solvent. “Anyhow, the people who live here fix plumbing, manage a bar in town, and one of them teaches the tuba, My plumbing sometimes needs fixing, I like a drink in town once in a while, and one day one of my kids might want to play the tuba. They fix faucets, I paint houses. What’s so strange?”

Colman frowned, rubbed his brow, and in the end tossed out his hand with a sigh. “No . . . we’re not making the right point somehow. Let’s put it this way—how can you
measure
who owes who what?” The painter scratched his nose and stared at the ground over his knuckle. Clearly the notion was new to him.

“How do you know when you’ve done enough work?” Jay asked him, trying to make it simpler.

The painter shrugged. “You just know. How do you know when you’ve had enough to eat?”

“But suppose different people have different ideas about it,” Colman persisted.

The painter shrugged again. “That’s okay. Different people value things differently. You can’t tell somebody else when they’ve had enough to eat.”

Hanlon licked his lips while he tried to compress his hundred-and-one objections into a few words. “Ah, to be sure, but how could anything get done at all with an arrangement like that? Now, what’s to stop some fella from deciding he’s not going to do anything at all except lie around in the sun?”

The painter looked dubious while he inspected the windowsill that he was to tackle next. “That doesn’t make much sense,” he murmured after a while. “Why would somebody stay poor if he didn’t have to? That’d be a strange kind of way to carry on.”

“He wouldn’t get away with it, surely,” Jay said incredulously. “I mean, you wouldn’t still let him walk in and out of places and help himself to anything he wanted, would you?”

“Why not?” the painter asked. “You’d have to feel kinda sorry for someone like that. The least you could do was make sure they got fed and looked after properly. We do get a few like that, and that’s what happens to them. It’s a shame, but what can anybody do?”

“You don’t understand,” Jay said. “On Earth, a lot of people would see that as their big ambition in life.”

The painter eyed him for a moment and nodded his head slowly. “Mmm . . . I kinda figured it had to be something like that,” he told them.

Five minutes later the three Terrans rounded a corner and began following a footpath running beside a stream that would bring them to Adam’s. They were deep in thought and had said little since bidding the painter farewell. After a short distance Jay slowed his pace and came to a halt, staring up at a group of tall Chironian trees standing on the far side of the stream alongside a number of familiar elms and maples that were evidently imported—genetically modified by the
Kuan-yin
’s
robots to grow in alien soil. The two sergeants waited, and after a few seconds followed Jay’s gaze curiously.

The trunks of the Chironian trees were covered by rough overlapping plates that resembled reptilian scales more than bark, and the branches, clustered together high near the tops in a way reminiscent of Californian sequoias, curved outward and upward to support domed canopies of foliage like the caps of gigantic mushrooms. The foliage was green at the bottoms of the domes but became progressively more yellow toward the tops, around which several furry, cat-sized, flying creatures were wheeling in slow, lazy circles and keeping up a constant chattering among themselves. “You wouldn’t think so, but that yellow stuff up there isn’t part of those trees at all,” Jay said, gesturing. “Jeeves told me about it. It’s a completely different species—a kind of fern. Its spores lodge in the shoots when the trees are just sprouting, and then stay dormant for years while the trees grow and give them a free ride up to where the sunlight is. It invades the leaf-buds and feeds through the tree’s vascular system.”

“Mmm . . .” Colman murmured. Botany wasn’t his line.

Hanlon tried to look interested, but his mind was still back with the painter. After a few seconds he looked at Colman. “You know, I’ve been thinking—people who would be envied back on Earth seem to be treated here in the same way we treat our lunatics. Do you think we’re all crazy to the Chironians?”