“But why not you, Besson?” Jenkins asked. “Is the SA really much better than Hitler?”
“Why not me, because I am not one to march in parades—even clandestine parades! I watch them from my window. When my wife… died… she…” He stared out the window, tried to swallow the sorrow. “That part of Paris is poisoned now. We will not use the big bombs, they agreed, eh? So they use the leetle nuclear bombs. What do they call them?”
“Tactical.” Hard-Eyes said.
“Yes. They only burn up a square kilometer, eh? Three square kilometers on the edge of Paris, one inside. Poisoned with radiation! So—it is okay to poison us only a petite amount, bit by bit? That is like choosing to torture a man to death instead of killing him cleanly…” He stood up abruptly, upsetting his chair, and walked stiffly out into the misting rain, without so much as an au revoir.
Hard-Eyes hugged himself, feeling cold.
“It’s crazy, staying in this town,” Jenkins said. But he said it musingly. There was no implication in it.
Hard-Eyes nodded, wondering, Why are we doing it? And the answer came: So that the world means something.
The boy came into the café and asked the shopkeeper if he could put a poster in the window. The shopkeeper shook his head, once, and hooked a thumb at the door. The boy made a great show of writing down the address of the shop.
Hard-Eyes thought, Surely it hasn’t come to that, surely not so soon…
But when they came to the café the next day, hoping to find Besson there, the café keeper was sorrowfully boarding up the windows. Someone had smashed out the glass, and on the wall beside the broken café window was spray-painted, in French, HE COLLABORATES WITH THE ENEMIES OF FRANCE!
So they walked back to the hostel Steinfeld’s people had put them in and said nothing on the way. They passed a supermarket, gutted and burned out in the lootings, and the posters were everywhere.
• 12 •
In Manhattan, and in the “A” building of the Second Alliance International Security Corporation, across the street from the Worldtalk Building, John Swenson typed up a coded communication to a man named Purchase. He told his terminal to send the communication to Purchase’s terminal, across the street and up forty floors. The communication was a message within a message within a message. To a man who was an agent within an agent, within an agency. Message one told Worldtalk that SAISC’s security preplanning for the Eighth International Congress of Orbital Manufacturers was complete. Message two, hidden within the signals for the first, was from the SA’s Second Circle, the ruling committee, to Purchase the SA agent. So far as the SAISC knew, Purchase was one of eighteen Worldtalk executives with greater and lesser degrees of loyalty to the Second Alliance. Message three, secreted within the second, was from Swenson the NR agent to Purchase the NR agent. Warning him that SAISC was making plans to implement a full corporate takeover of Worldtalk—the world’s biggest public relations firm and potentially the most powerful tool for propaganda known to modern man…
Swenson sighed and wondered if he had done well to send it through an SAISC terminal. How closely was Sackville-West monitoring everything that went out? There was no such thing as an unbreakable code. He looked at his watch. Ellen Mae ought to be alone in her office about now. He picked up a sheet of computer printouts and walked down the hall. Her door was open. He knocked on the frame and went in.
“What have we got here?” Ellen Mae Crandall asked, in her most musical voice, as Swenson laid the printout on her desk. “You could have sent it,” she added, nodding toward her desk terminal. She smiled. She’d said it to give him his opening.
Swenson said smiling softly, “Maybe it’s because any excuse to see you personally…” He shrugged. Ellen Mae blushed, really blushed, by God, and he wondered if he’d gone too far.
She looked hastily at the report. “Oh, the FirStep Colony. Is this from Praeger?” She frowned. “Why didn’t he send it to me directly?”
“He sent it to Colony Intelligence Director—which as of this morning is yours truly.”
“Oh, I forgot! There’s so much, without Rick, to keep track of…” She sighed. Playing helpless female now.
He put his hand on her arm, telling himself to ignore the arm’s slight excess of black hairs, and said, “He’s going to be back with us soon.”
She swallowed, flustered, but gave no sign she wanted him to take his hand away.
Purchase was right about her, Swenson thought.
She glanced over the report. “What’s, um, the gist of this?”
He straightened, and put his hands in his jacket pocket. “There isn’t a lot to it. They can’t get anything but short transmissions out, and fewer of those lately, with the Russians sending out their scrambling signal. Rimpler is possibly cracking under pressure. He’s unstable anyway. He’s got a lot of popular support but among the technickis there are two other men Praeger thinks he can put in to replace Rimpler. On the technicki level, of course. Rimpler’s daughter is a problem…”
She wasn’t listening, she was staring straight ahead with a patently artificial look of having remembered something important. “Oh, my gosh.”
Oh, my gosh? Swenson thought. Aloud he said, “Something wrong?”
“I’ve just realized I’ve got to get a full report on this to Rick, tomorrow. I’ve told him he shouldn’t work, but he—well, you know how he is. You can’t keep him away from it. If he were in a hospital maybe we could, you know, encourage him to take it easy, the doctors have some kind of authority there. But he’s out at Cloudy Peak Farm, and he’s just like Daddy was—once he gets on the farm, he’s the Farmer and no one can say a word to him!”
Swenson chuckled, and thought, maybe the polite chuckling all the time is the hardest part of all.
She went on, “I promised him I’d get this to him—you know, my own analysis. But I don’t think I can do it alone, and with everything else…” She turned to him as if she’d just thought of it. “John, do you think you could come out to the farm tonight? We could work late, so I could have it in the morning…”
“I’d be honored.” he said, and in a way it was true.
And this time he was careful not to put his hand on her arm. It was all still a question of timing.
“Security will pick us up at six, at the front door.” she said briskly, turning all studiedly businesslike.
“I’ll be there with bells on,” he said, knowing she liked old-fashioned expressions. He smiled at her and went back to his office. And couldn’t suppress a stab of pity for her…
As the helicopter settled down over Cloudy Peak Farm, Swenson hung on to the straps and closed his eyes. He didn’t mind flying—it was coming down or going up to begin the flying that scared him. It wasn’t the sky, it was the ground. The ground could be hostile to flying things. It smashed them, if they weren’t careful.
And he’d already seen the Crandall’s farm on the helicopter’s first circling approach… A river cut a purple trail through the moonlit trees. The moonlight showed a great swatch of lawn, the glistening snail tracks of two steel fences, and the cluster of trees around the main house. Smaller servants’ houses huddled to one side. Behind the house a barn, according to rumor, sheltered a few cows, a couple of sheep, horses—but it wasn’t really an actual farm anymore. It was “a combination of pastoral religious retreat and Second Alliance planning center,” to use Purchase’s phrase.