Z-Sting Page 19

  The darkness-adapted Croyd eyes saw that the Saguni eyes were open, although Saguni’s lips remained clamped. Remorselessly Croyd pressed: “Because of this dirt that Andhra dredged up, and at his bidding, you fixed COMCORD so that grievances against Senevendia would pile up past the critical point. Care to tell me how you did that?”

  “I admit nothing.”

  “Could it be done?”

  Hesitation, then: “Yes.”

  “Care to tell me how?”

  “It is too technical. You would not understand.”

  “God help me, Saguni, I was Thoth Evans, I invented COMCORD!”

  The Saguni eyes went wide, the mouth went slack. Then earnestly: “Please let me up. I want to talk.”

  “You won’t attack me?”

  “I tried that once.”

  “No hara-kiri?”

  “Not yet; and if I start, you’ll have plenty of time to stop me. It takes time to do it right—and I too was too early toilet trained.”

  Croyd dismounted from him. “How is your Oedipus?”

  “Fine, thank you.” Saguni struggled up to a sitting position, shook himself all over, got his knees Riponese-crossed, and demanded: “How could a young man like you have the effrontery to claim paternity to COMCORD?”

  “Later, if you like; not now, there is no time. The real point is, you don’t have to talk down to me. I think I let you up to talk straight.”

  Saguni’s eyes went stony. “I wanted to ask you questions. If you have no time for this, I have nothing to say.” “Then I will tell you what else you did with COMCORD. Andhra saw to it that you did not stop with Senevendia: he did not want merely to curse his own constellation, he cosmically wanted to genie-bottle Erthworld humanity: Senevendia is merely the prime target for the salving of Andhra’s negative Oedipus.”

  The eyes were wide again. “What else do you think you know?”

  “You fixed it so that the Z-waves programmed for Senevendia would be accompanied by other waves programmed for Chihattan and for Moskov. Three remote Erth-targets: blanket effect for the planet. So the waves will permanently cocoon Erth—which naturally will tear itself apart with species psychosis in the Zeitgeist casket Saguni, even pre-man could see and wonder about the moon and stars!”

  The eyes stared, the lips quivered.

  Croyd thrust: “But that is not quite enough for me to know, is it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Tell me what else I need to know.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To head off doomsnight.”

  “Philosophically I agree with Chancellor Andhra. I see no reason to head off doomsnight.”

  “I am not here to correct your philosophy. I am here to head off doomsnight.”

  “I do not choose to head off doomsnight. There are things that the world must not know.”

  “I know. Colossal, guilty things, Saguni. That you put seven lumps of sugar in your tea. That you lost your heart to a high official who happened to be a boy instead of a girl. That your mother was a Moskovite—”

  “You know that?”

  “Some people need more sweets than others. Some people get sexually mixed up. Some people’s mothers are even Vespucian. I fail to see what is so abysmally tragic.”

  “Nevertheless I will not have it known. If I were to help you to stop the waves—which is impossible—Andhra would make it all known.”

  “Even about the sugar?”

  “Do not make fun of me. I refer to the—unspeakable sin.”

  “More unspeakable than burying mankind?”

  “Mankind needs burying. Mankind also needs no more revelations of human iniquity.”

  “So you terminate ’em all to keep Andhra from telling on you.”

  “You oversimplify it, but—yes. And one warning. To know all you know, somehow you must have tapped my brain. This means that you can practice projective hypnosis. Don’t try it on me: I know how to resist it.”

  “Saguni—pardon me for one more simplification—Andhra has taken the hundred-year sleep.”

  The eyelids flickered.

  After a moment, expressionless: “He has?”

  “Is he the only one who knows about your unspeakability?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  “Has he written it down anywhere for posterity to read in case he should happen to take the hundred-year sleep?”

  “Not in case he should take the hundred-year sleep—”

  “Then it seems to me that for a philosophical Riponese, you are remarkably impatient for the world to poop out. The world really can’t learn about your total depravity until Andhra awakens from his hundred-year sleep, can it?”

  “Nevertheless—”

  “Then, too, there is this other way of looking at it. COMCORD should have triggered the Penultimate Trigger some hours ago—but it hasn’t yet. This means that a certain delaying tactic of mine is working, and we have hours if not days. In another phrasing, there remain hours if not days during which—once I have left here with my knowledge—the world will know that you take all that sugar and that your heart belongs to daddy and that you sabotaged humanity. And that your mother was a Moskovite.”

  Saguni’s eyes closed.

  A full minute of noisy breathing.

  He said without expression: “Index 3•0 denotes H-hour. At H-hour, COMCORD Central will emit a scrambled signal by generalized broadcast, and it will be picked up and unscrambled by the Penultimate Trigger and relayed to the finalizing Z-sting.”

  “Where is the Penultimate Trigger?”

  “Five kilometers along these corridors.”

  It petrified Croyd. “Here? Under the Palace of Minos?”

  “Is it not quaint—and unfindable?”

  Croyd was on his feet, pulling up Saguni. “Take me there in a hurry. Talk on the way.”

  Rehab Action Nine

  EIGHT HOURS FOUR MINUTES

  Erth, Moon, and Space, 23 May

  Saguni’s jet-mole sped them through five kilometers of the rock-bumpy labyrinth in nine minutes flat. The trip would have whitened the hair of Theseus. It thrilled Croyd for Minotaur reasons.

  He got Saguni talking, a little, without slowing the mole. The lost location secret had fallen into the hands of the Saguni technician family and had been clutched to its breast as an in-mystery. But even the Saguni had never known the location of the Z-sting, although they knew its theory and design to a synapse.

  “Then what was this business about Antarctica that Internal Security is supposed to have—”

  “A decoy. Anyway—”

  The mole penetrated by pre-activation an impenetrable force-field barrier and debouched into a great room where Croyd half expected scattered human bones and, bobbing in a central pool, the decaying body of Waltari’s old Minotaur monster. Instead, the room was crystal-clean as a clinic, and brilliantly lighted by pre-activation; and centered in it was something more reminiscent of O’Neill’s old dynamo—a vast neat intricate expanse of computerized telemetricity.

  Saguni leaped from the mole and ran for the control panel, with Croyd crowding him. Swiftly scanning the complex instrumentation which would have teased Croyd for easily half an hour just learning how to read it, Saguni suddenly stooped, peered at a dial, cross-checked with other dials, then turned and somberly informed his captor: “It is too late. The penultimate impulses have already been triggered.”

  “When?”

  "At 1253 hours. Approximately seventy-nine minutes ago.”

  "Into that mole, and get us back fast to the surface!”

  En route in the mole: “It seems that activation of the Penultimate Trigger came considerably before you played Old Man of the Sea to my Sinbad. Be grateful, Dr. Saguni, your guilt is not seriously augmented, you have only delayed prophylaxis. What happens next?”

  "The penultimate impulses proceed to the Z-sting, wherever it is, on a direct laser route, reaching the sting in a little over four hours. Then and there the sting releases
the Z-waves which proceed toward their Erth targets, engaging their tempopatterns about four hours two minutes later—at this time of this year.”

  “And that is curtains?”

  “That is curtains.”

  “Exactly how much time do we have for impossible preventive action?”

  “Double four hours two minutes is eight hours four minutes. Deduct about eighty minutes since the triggering. You have about six hours forty minutes to save Erth. Give up, sir. Even a counter-impulse could not overtake the penultimate impulse, because all would be traveling at the same light velocity, three hundred thousand kilometers per second. And once the Z-waves are launched by the sting, they are unstoppable—except by three failsafes which I have prudently destroyed.”

  “So the world is already dead.”

  “It is, sir.” Unexpectedly, and for the first time, Saguni’s mouth corners flickered. “You have barely enough time to go out and tell the world about my guilt.”

  Croyd mused: “Unhappily, neither of us knows the location of the Z-sting—”

  Then Croyd went stiff. “Heavenly Isanagi—it has to be Neptune! It always had to be—on the timing!”

  “It did? But then that explains the locations of the three failsafes!”

  Carlton, back in Manhattan, had deployed her Rab credits shrewdly enough to hold up H-hour by quite a number of hours. It had bought him time to find the Penultimate Trigger, but not time enough to kill it. Had it bought him time for the Z-sting—four billion kilometers out, on Neptune?

  Croyd guiltily reflected that at various places along the line he had probably shot the eighty minutes.

  Dana with Keri in the scouter picked them up promptly, caught the terminal urgency, made for the Mazurka.

  Contacting the ship en route, Marana issued rat-a-tat orders and demanded: “Understood, Mr. Mulcahy?”

  “Yessir. I should tell you, though, that—”

  “Wait, Mulcahy. Repeat my orders first.”

  “The only problem is, sir, that—”

  “What were my orders, Mister?”

  “Yessir. Prepare for crash move-out to Moon, maximum acceleration, instantly upon your arrival.” He added the other aspects of Marana’s orders. Then: “Sir, I have already relayed these orders to crew, but—”

  “Very good, Pete. Now what is your but?”

  “But Chairman Marta Evans is aboard.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Saguni huddled chorioned in tragedy.

  They braked into the open scouter-hatch of the Mazurka. Croyd was out of the scouter, running toward the frigate’s bridge. “You’re on your own!” Marana shot at Keri and Saguni, and he took off after Croyd.

  When the commander caught up, the old man (old? by Krishna, he was fortyish!) was already on the bridge—Standing in something like paralysis, looking at Marta, whom Marana did not instantly recognize, although he knew her image well from a thousand newskens tridema and didema, motionful and still, because now she was a Viking blonde in her middle forties, and because she was gazing at Croyd in a mood not at all to be expected of Erthworld’s ancient chairman . . .

  But then Marana blurted: “Welcome aboard, Madame Chairman, and I’m sure you will excuse my emergency discourtesy. Mr. Croyd, your orders?”

  Not turning from Marta, Croyd crisped: “Get us to Moon fast, and make prior visicom contact with Moonbase. You’re excused for that, I’ll join you in a moment.”

  Marana moved, leaving Croyd alone with the rapt transformation of Marta. Croyd was seeing again almost the young woman of forty-four years ago, or (for him) two days ago, who had all unawares dragged him into her capsule off the virginal Nereid rock.

  He had meant to youthen her, yes—but more than a generation in two days?

  Marta mind-swirled. Knowing that she was out-of-hand young again, she felt it but could not believe it. His face told her that he was seeing her young again; she could not believe this either. And he was young again, maybe a wiry forty-five again, his short hair all auburn without any white, his eyes clear burning blue, his sober face muscular, lean, his wide mouth smileable but just now twisted in bewilderment at her new semi-youth, his rangy body instantly ready for any kind of action; all this embodying a mind-brain beyond anything she had ever imagined. And he was the one who had youthened her!

  The warmth in her throat spread across her shoulders and up into her face: blonde as she was, the flush had to be noticed, and so it deepened. The exquisiteness oversweeping her was like the ineffable fey that had possessed her when at thirteen she had met in visibooks with Sir Launcelot, or like when at seventeen she had been gently kissed by a strong youth who had then gone away leaving her virginal and soul-hurt. But it was not at all like the specific nipple-hardening clitoris-twitch that had belly-puckeringly reanimated her when Ziska had first crouched into her ken and she had dreamed lasciviously about him during months while holding him at stern authoritarian arm’s length and finally had come out of it thinking of Ziska and all other real men only in asexual terms but semibound to Ziska and still and always virginal.

  With effort, for her own mind control was not small, she drove down the blood-flush out of her face and neck into her shoulders where it was hidden-existent beneath her long-sleeved blouse; and she stared straight into Croyd’s eyes, bringing her mind back into something like Marta-lucidity. She was young again, yes; but precisely by virtue of her new vigor, her self-discipline was all the more potent, her unusual mind was all the more elastic . . .

  She paled, swept by a new weakening. Never had she fully believed the Croyd name: because of his abilities and his knowledges, the Thoth Evans remote possibility had been strongly influential in her more-than-tentative trust of him. Now, via two days of intensive research through intricate contacts, she knew he was Thoth Evans, father of Mare Stellarum and her own great-grandfather. And she knew by this token that there was a semi-incestuous quality in her now unconditional desire for him, her yearning for anything at all . . .

  But this was crazy! he was artificially young again, she was artificially young. If they should couple, it would be jaded Cleopatra with jaded Antony. Gland-zing was bracing; but what finally counted was the mind-memory contexture, and for each of them that was old, only, he did not act old . . .

  The ship was accelerating for Moon at G’s so high that they troublesomely penetrated the inertial shield. Marta leaned against the G-wind, considering Evans-Croyd—who considered his great-granddaughter while he leaned against the G-wind . . .

  Cut it!

  Marta the Chairman, driving herself back into emergency command-severity, snapped: “I came here on a hunch—and sure enough, here you are. Did you know that COMCORD triggered off H-hour two hours ago?” Her command tactic steadied her, sternly she regarded him, stern inwardly too, glacial in the implacable momentum of her severity: equal to him . . .

  She could see him driving himself into meeting her new mood. It crossed her mind, thawing it, that he had been responsive, looking at her. But now he said hard (in her feeling, male-hard): “That’s why I’m here. That’s why we’re moving to Moon.”

  She shot a withering look at him. “I fail to understand why. Ziska says his people neutralized the Z-sting in Antarctica. One notes also that Erth is still intact. So why all this business?”

  Distressingly for her, his face softened a trifle, as though perhaps he sympathized with her dupery; and his voice too was soft as he told her: “The Antarctic site was a dummy. Ziska was took.”

  Sympathy? For me? Her voice went brittle: “Care to prove it?”

  His trace of sympathy vanished, he went slightly sardonic. “I brought back the technical master of COMCORD, Dr. Saguni. He did the dire deed, for reasons you’ll never get me to tell. Care to interview him?”

  It blew her wide open: she came inwardly erect, respecting him; she dropped the command pose and responded low, man to man. “No time, Croyd. I have a feeling that you won’t lie to me now.” Bitter, then: “So Ziska has goofed u
p an Erth-mortal crisis. I have difficulty preventing myself from being glad. Pray summarize the facts.”

  Soberly he sketched the peril. He added: “All this will hit Erth in approximately six hours—unless I stop it in two hours. The Z-sting is really located on—I hate myself for being the one to tell you this—”

  She knew that he was going to clobber her with something—but sympathetically. In her heart he became suddenly greater than she. Dropping all defenses, Marta directed: “Say it.”

  He frowned. He said: “Neptune.”

  During two-tenths of a second she assimilated it; during another five-tenths of a second she wilted; during the remainder of the second she struggled to recover; and at the end of the second she hoarsed: “Right under my goddamned idiotic Nordic nose!”

  His hands had her hands; in her chagrin she half-noticed. Now her mind was old again; and it was filled with ancient stuff called The Purloined Letter out of a man named Poe. In her youth, would she have let this happen . . . Now, would she have . . . Eh, but it had happened when she had been old, old; and new youth couldn’t matter now, for in her earlier old age she had trusted the security of Neptune merely because it was near, and so she had neglected surveillance . . .

  Her eyes came slowly up to his eyes; she was making no attempt at releasing her hands. “What about the failsafes? There were supposed to be three of them—”

  “They are, as it turns out, the artificial satellites Velos, Miros, and Heros.”

  “But they are supposed to be collecting astronomical data!”

  “In fact, they are potential blotters for the Z-waves. Should the offending constellation chicken out after the H-hour triggering, Saguni could rekamatically command these three satellites to broadcast the tempopattern of the target metropolis. Depending on the time, one of these satellites would then become the target, absorbing the waves and screening Erth—”

  "How much time margin?”

  “If Velos near Jupiter-orbit could be activated in time, 2576 seconds margin; if Miros near Mars-orbit, 751 seconds margin; if last-ditch Heros 900,000 kilometers out from Erth, 3 seconds margin. Of course I am citing averages—”