Spinneret (34 page)

“All right. Then tell me how the digger search went. Any of them in working condition?”

“Just the one with the stone in its tread,” Perez said, relieved by the change of topic. “We got it out, and last we saw it was tunneling cheerfully into the rock. I left word at the op cent for a round-the-clock watch on it.”

“Good. We'll want to see where it goes when it's full.” He frowned. “You have any estimate on the horsepower of the thing?”

Perez shrugged. “Not really. Between fifty and a hundred, I'd guess. Why?”

“Because the ability to idle or whatever for a hundred millennia
and
also put out that kind of power means that the digger's either got one hell of a battery pack or else is running off some kind of broadcast power. Either way, it's just one more goody to tempt potential invaders.”

Perez shook his head. “You worry far too much about that, Colonel, in my opinion. After the M'zarch fiasco no one's going to be brash enough to launch an invasion.
Especially
when they don't know exactly what we've got down here that might serve as weapons.”

“Maybe,” Meredith sighed. “But maybe not. The longer they hesitate, the more entrenched we become. And I'm sure they realize that.”

“Let 'em realize it,” Perez said, stepping toward the elevator. “In my humble and untrained opinion it's already too late for a successful invasion. Well. If that's all you wanted, my duty's up for the day and I'm going home. You coming?”

“Not yet,” Meredith said, his eyes drifting to the windows and the Spinner village below. “I think I'll stick around and see if anything happens when the digger goes to dump its load.”

Secretary-General Saleh—leader of the UN, chief trade representative to alien races, and arguably the most powerful man on Earth—laid down the last sheet of paper with the bitter taste of helplessness on his tongue. “What you're asking is essentially a carte blanche for whatever you want to do on Astra,” he said wearily. “You know I can't give you that.”

“Why not?” Ashur Msuya asked. “The people want action—or haven't you been watching the newscasts lately?”

Saleh snorted. “Surely you don't expect me to take all those carefully staged demonstrations seriously?”

“The rest of the world does. And as for my proposal, it's clearly spelled out that you have the final word on anything I do.”

“Oh, of course—except that the eight-day round trip renders that effectively meaningless.”

“Only if you're looking for true veto power,” Msuya said quietly.
“And
true responsibility.”

For a long time Saleh stared into Msuya's unblinking eyes, knowing deep within him there was no way the man would be stopped. Saleh had originally chosen him to lead the mission to Astra because of his intensely pro-Third World stance, a bias Saleh had hoped would act as a bulwark against the West's usual ability to get more than its fair share of things. But the plan had backfired. Whatever motivations of justice Msuya may once have had were gone, submerged beneath his utter hatred for Colonel Meredith. With or without Saleh's permission he would find a way to destroy the colonel … and if Saleh stood in his way he might well precipitate a power struggle within the Secretariat itself, a battle that could cost Saleh his position and simultaneously wreck any chance the world might have for international peace and unity.

But if Saleh officially backed his proposal, the Secretary-General was covered. A success in reclaiming Astra would reflect favorably on him; a failure would be Msuya's responsibility alone. The inherent communications time lag would give Msuya effective autonomy. If he chose to act on something their new Astran spies reported, there would be no chance for Saleh to exercise his supposed veto power.

And Msuya knew it. He was offering his political future against a chance for vengeance.

Dropping his gaze to the papers before him, Saleh sighed. “All right,” he said, picking up a pen. “You'll take the
Trygve Lie
and go to Astra, sending the
Hammarskjöld
home when you get there. You
will
keep within the boundaries set in this paper, observing and collecting information
only.
No action of
any
kind without my written permission first.”

“I understand,” Msuya nodded.

Sure you do.
The meaningless words still tingling on his tongue, Saleh signed the page and tossed the batch of them across the desk. “Have my secretary give you a copy,” he growled. “I'll arrange for the
Hammarskjöld
to rendezvous with you periodically to deliver supplies and bring back any information you gather. In an emergency the Ctencri could probably be persuaded to deliver a message.”

Msuya smiled tightly as he stood up. “Don't worry. I'm sure there will be no emergencies.” Turning, he left the room.

My new frontier,
Saleh thought dully, staring at the closed door.
My quixotic hope for the restless and hopeless; the world I personally helped begin … and now I must simply sit by and watch while you live or die.
For the first time in his life, he began to understand the permanent melancholy in his grandmother's face that had always bothered and frightened him as a child.

His grandmother had been a midwife in a small Southern Yemeni village … a village with a fifteen percent infant mortality rate.

S
UDDENLY, IT SEEMED, IT
was autumn.

Not like autumn in Pennsylvania, of course, Hafner thought as he climbed up one of the hillocks bordering the Dead Sea; not even like autumn in southern California. Here there were no maples or oaks to scatter colored leaves around like God's own currency thrown freely to rich and poor alike. On Astra the only signs of fall were a drop in air temperature and a gradual reduction in the number of daylight hours. Turning, Hafner squinted at the cone of Mt. Olympus in the near distance.
Odd,
he thought.
I can't even force myself to see it as a natural formation anymore. I wonder why I couldn't see it as anything else before:

Carmen's voice drifting up from below interrupted his idle reverie. “Aren't you supposed to plant a flag or something when you get to the summit?”

Turning back, he grinned at her. “You come up with an Astran flag I can live with and I'd be pleased to plant it,” he called. “Most of the designs I've seen so far would be more suitable for burial.”

“You're an aesthetic snob,” she said, laughing. “Come on down; lunch is ready.”

He scrambled back down the gentle slope and joined her on the spread-out blanket. “At least we won't have any problem with ants,” Carmen commented, handing him a sandwich. “Eat hearty; it's the first batch of processed algae from the Flying Hothouse.”

Cautiously, Hafner took a bite. It was pretty good, actually, though not quite up to normal California standards. The texture was about right, and it took no real effort to believe he was eating actual ham. “Not bad,” he nodded, the words coming out mushy around the food. “Especially with, what, only a week of work?”

“Closer to two—you've been spending too much time underground lately. Of course, the processing'll go much faster now that all the bugs are out of the system.”

“Yeah.” Hafner took another bite. “Speaking of being underground, you haven't told me yet what you thought of the Spinner cavern.”

She shook her head. “I wish I had the words to do it properly. It's the most fantastic thing I've ever seen. Does that artificial sun actually track across the sky?”

“Sure does,” he nodded. “Gives us a cycle of twenty hours of daylight to ten of night, presumably matching that of the Spinners' home world. And the sun isn't a hologram, or at least they don't think so—the light intensity is too great and matches a G3 star spectrum too closely. No one knows yet what it is or how they get it to move. Ditto for the clouds and stars, by the way.”

She shook her head again. “I see now why you and Cris and the colonel were so dead-set on keeping the place out of the wrong hands—human or otherwise. I've been thinking—well, never mind.”

“You've been thinking we were all going megalomaniac?” he prompted.

“Well … maybe a little. But I think I understand now.”

“Good. Maybe it'll help you in your trade negotiations. How are they going, by the way?”

“Oh, business is booming. I've got six contracts in the stack, just waiting on the raw metal deliveries. I calculate that in a couple of years we'll have a shot at passing the U.S.'s GNP.”

“And with a fraction of its population. The old oil barons will turn over in their graves.”

Carmen was silent for a moment. “Maybe we should start figuring out how we're going to share all that wealth.”

He frowned at her, trying to place that tone of voice. “You've been talking to Perez, haven't you?” he asked. “All that stuff about the
New Mayflower.”

“The who?”

“Oh, he hasn't sprung that one on you yet? He wants us to buy the
Aurora
or
Pathfinder
and outfit it for shuttling immigrants here from Earth.”

She sighed. “That sounds like him: great with people but no head at all for economics. We could probably rent M'zarch troop carriers a lot cheaper than buying one of our own.”

Hafner made a face. “Well, I hope
one
of you experts is thinking about where we'd put this flood of fo—flood of people,” he corrected himself hastily.

“We recognize the problems,” Carmen said, giving him an odd look. “We're not going to rush into anything half-cocked. What kind of flood were you going to call it?”

Silently, Hafner cursed his tongue. “A flood of foreigners,” he admitted reluctantly. “Perez wants to recruit people mostly from the poorer Third World nations.”

“And?” Carmen prompted, her voice studiously neutral.

“Well, face it—if that happens we original Astrans are going to wind up as a pretty small minority here. Those of us who came here because we wanted to are going to be flooded out by people looking for the ticket window to the galaxy's gravy train.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” For a moment Carmen gazed out at the waters of the Dead Sea, her forehead furrowed in thought. “I don't know what to say,” she sighed at last. “It
will
change Astra—there's no doubt about that. We're four small villages that are going to become huge cities, and those of us who've sweated through the rough times are likely to get lost in the crowd, But we can't simply live here alone like—well, like the oil barons you mentioned. After all, it's not like this is profit from something we've done ourselves.”

“Why do we have to bring all of them
here,
though?” Hafner grumbled. “Why not just give the money to them right where they are or something? Hey—that may be it.”

“May be what?” Carmen asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

“The answer to our dilemma.” The thoughts were coming thick and fast now, and Hafner fumbled a bit as he tried to keep up with them. “It'll be like foreign aid—better yet, like a new Marshall Plan. We can funnel a portion of our profit to the poorer countries, probably in the form of credit with the Ctencri, maybe tie the amount to inverse GNP per capita so that it goes to the countries who need it most—”

“And how do you guarantee it goes to the
people
who need it most?”

“—with a clause to prevent—um? Oh.” The grand scheme seemed to explode into soap suds in front of him. “Yeah. Well … we could write something into the agreements, I suppose.”

Carmen smiled sadly. “Half the countries that need that sort of aid already reject help that has any strings attached. Besides, the contract hasn't been written yet that someone couldn't find a loophole in.”

Hafner pursed his lips tightly. She had indeed been talking to Perez, he decided; talking
and
listening. “It'd still be better than trying to bring the starving millions here,” he growled. “Most of them don't have any skill except farming, and they sure as potholes aren't going to continue that line of work here.”

“I know,” Carmen sighed. “And I don't know how we're going to get around that. All we can do is keep working on it.”

“Yeah.” Hafner looked down at the half sandwich still clutched in his hand. “So much for our nice, quiet lunch away from the universe,” he said, shaking his head. “Look, why don't we sort of back out and come in again, okay? Let's just enjoy our algae and the lovely gray-brown scenery and forget about politics for a while.”

“Sure. I'm sorry I brought up the subject.” Carmen smiled wanly and took a bite of her own sandwich. “So … what sort of gossip do you hear lately?”

They talked about people, the rate of progress of the Earth scientists, and other relatively innocuous subjects for the next hour; and when Hafner escorted Carmen back to the Spinneret camp and her waiting vehicle, she professed herself satisfied with the break from the pressures of her work.

He pretended to believe her … but as she drove off toward Unie he felt his own cheerful expression sag into a grimace.
Just too dedicated to her job,
he thought, shaking his head as he trudged toward his crackerbox apartment to await his early-evening shift.
Probably won't be able to really relax until this whole immigrant thing is resolved. Perez will see to that, I'm sure.
The thought of the Hispanic infecting her with his own excessively liberal philosophy was more than a little annoying, but there wasn't a lot he could do about it.

Except perhaps to offer an alternative to his grand immigration scheme. So far, Hafner had heard nothing that corresponded to his Marshall Plan idea being tossed around during mealtime discussions; and if it truly
hadn't
occurred to anyone, he really ought to point it out to Colonel Meredith. Despite Carmen's skepticism, it seemed to him the plan had potential merit.