The nonrebellious majority of colonists would remain nonrebellious if Kane left them alone. But the Sons of Earth, with their privileged knowledge of the ramrobot gifts, could stir them to killing wrath at any time. Would Harry Kane wait for the New Law?
Four power blocs, and Implementation too. Being Head meant an endless maze of details, minor complaints, delivery of reprimands, paperwork, petty internal politics--he could get lost in such a maze and never know it until a screaming colonist army came to storm the Hospital.
It was a wonder he ever got around to Matt Keller.
Matt lived on his back, with his right side encased in concrete and his right leg dangling in space. He was given pills that reduced the pains to permanent, aggravating aches.
The woman in the organ-bank smock examined him from time to time. Matt suspected she saw him as potential organ-bank material, of dubious value. On Wednesday he overheard someone calling her Dr. Bennet. He had never thought of asking her name, as she had never thought of giving it.
In the early morning hours, when the sleeping pills were wearing off, or during afternoon naps, he was plagued by nightmares. Again his elbow smashed a nose across a man's face, and again there was the awful shock of terror and triumph. Again he asked the way to the vivarium, turned, and raised his arm to see the skin beaded with bright blood. Again he stood in the organ banks, unable to run, and he woke drenched in perspiration. Or, with a stolen sonic he dropped uniformed men until the remembered sonic backlash turned his arm to wood. He woke, and his right arm had gone to sleep under him.
He thought of his family with nostalgia. He saw Jeannie and her husband every few months; they lived not twenty miles from Gamma's major mining area. But he hadn't seen his mother and father in years. How good it would be to see them again!
Even the memory of mining worms filled him with nostalgia. They were unpredictable, yes, but compared to Hood or Polly or Laney... at least he could understand mining worms.
His curiosity had been as dead as his right leg. On Wednesday evening it returned with a rush.
Why was the Hospital treating him? If he had been captured, why hadn't he been taken apart already? How had Laney and Kane been allowed to visit him?
He was frantic with impatience. Dr. Bennet didn't appear until noon Thursday. Somewhat to his surprise, she was not at all reluctant to talk.
"I don't understand it myself," she told Matt. "I do know that all the live rebels have been turned loose, and we aren't getting any more organ-bank material. Old Parlette's the Head now, and a lot of his relatives are working here too. Pure crew, working in the Hospital."
"It must be strange to you."
"It's weird. Old Parlette is the only one who knows what's really going on--if he does. Does he?"
Does he? Matt groped at the question. "What makes you think I know?"
"He's given orders that you're to be treated with an excess of tender loving care. He must have some reason, Keller."
"I suppose he must."
When it was obvious that that was all he had to say, she said, "If you've got any more questions, you can ask your friends. They'll be here Saturday. There's another weird thing--all the colonists wandering through the Hospital, and we've got orders not to touch them. I hear some of them are proven rebels."
"I'm one myself."
"I thought you might be."
"After my leg heals, will I be turned loose?"
"I suppose so, from the way you're being treated. It's up to Parlette." Her treatment of him had become curiously ambivalent. By turns he was her inferior, confidant, and patient. "Why don't you ask your friends on Saturday?"
That night they hooked up a sleepmaker at the head of his bed. "Why didn't they do that before?" he asked one of the workmen. "It must be safer than pills."
"You're looking at it wrong," the man told him. "Most of the patients here are crew. You don't think a crew would use a vivarium sleepmaker, do you?"
"Too proud, huh?"
"I told you. They're crew."
There was a listening bug in, the headset.
To Parlette, Matt was part of the paperwork. His was one of the dossiers lying on Jesus Pietro's desk. Its cover was scorched, like the others; but the Head's office, on the second floor, had escaped most of the damage from the Planck's wildfire drive.
Parlette went through all those dossiers and many more. By now he knew that the worst threat to his "New Law" was defection by the Sons of Earth. Only they, with their presumed control over the colonists, could make it work; and only they were beyond his control.
Matthew Keller's dossier was unusual in its skimpiness. There wasn't even a record of his joining the rebel organization. Yet he must belong. Castro's notes implied that Keller had freed the vivarium prisoners. He had been badly hurt invading the Hospital a second time. He must be partly responsible for the Planck disaster. He seemed to be connected with the mystery of the bleeding-heart symbol. A very active rebel, Matthew Keller.
Then there was Harry Kane's disproportionate interest in him.
Parlette's first evanescent impulse was to have him die of his injuries. He'd caused too much destruction already. Probably the Planck's library could never be replaced. But getting Harry Kane's trust was far more important.
On Thursday Dr. Bennet sent him word that Keller would be receiving visitors. Installing a listening bug was an obvious precaution. Millard Parlette made a note of the coming interview--at Saturday noon--then forgot it until then.
When Hood had finished talking, Matt smiled and said, "I told you they were little hearts and livers."
It didn't go over. The four of them looked solemnly back at him, like a jury circling his hospital bed.
When they'd first come in, he'd wondered if they were all slated for the organ banks. They'd been so deadly serious, and they moved with coordination, as if they'd rehearsed this.
Hood had talked for almost half an hour, with occasional interruptions from Harry Kane and no comments at all from Laney and Mrs. Hancock. It still seemed rehearsed. You do all the talking, Jay, someone must have said. Break it to him gently. Then... But what they'd told him was all good.
"You've still got that bad-news look," he said. "Why so solemn? All is roses. We're all going to live forever. No more Implementation raids. No more being hauled off to the organ banks without a trial. We can even build wooden houses if we're crazy enough to want them. The millenium has come at last."
Harry Kane spoke. "And what's to keep Parlette from breaking all his rash promises?"
Matt still couldn't see why it should involve him. "You think he might?"
"Look at it logically, Keller. Parlette has Castro's job now. He's the Head. He runs Implementation."
"That's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Kane. "I want him to have all the power he can grab, because he's the only man who can put the New Law across--if he chooses. But let's just back off a little and look at how much power he does have.
"He runs Implementation." Kane ticked it off on a finger. "He's trained his own clan to use hunting guns. That gives him most of the weapons on Mount Lookitthat. He can twist the Council around his little finger. Parlette is well on his way to being the world's first emperor!"
"But you could stop him. You said yourself that you can raise the colony against him any time you like."
Kane waved it off. "We can't do that. Sure, it's a good threat, especially after what we've already done to Implementation. But we don't want a bloodbath any more than Parlette does, or says he does. No, we need something else to hold over him."