Colin Kowalski arrived about 9:00 P.M. I was still under house arrest, or whatever, but Charlotte Prescott had apparently run out of questions. The foodbelt was working, serving an insatiable line of the hungry, who peered curiously at the Y-shield cramping them into half their cafe but could see nothing because the outer layer had been one-way opaqued.
“Colin. I’m glad you’re here.”
He was angry, not hiding it, but keeping it under control. I gave him points for all three.
“You should have contacted me in August, Diana. Maybe we could have stopped release of the duragem dissembler sooner.”
“Can you stop it now?” I said, but he didn’t answer. I wasn’t having any of that. I grabbed both his lapels — or what passes for lapels in the new fall fashions — and said, slowly and with great distinctness, “You’ve found something. Already. Colin, you have to tell me what you’ve found so far. You have to. I got you all this far, and besides there’s no earthly reason not to tell me. You know damn well you’ve got reporters all over every place out there by now.”
He stepped back a pace and pulled his lapels free. Billy and Doug Kane and Jack Sawicki and Annie and Krystal Mandor had been all over each other constantly. I was a little shocked at how quickly I’d forgotten the donkey intolerance for being touched.
But I was not going to give up. Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to involve Billy more than he already was by having taken me into Annie’s apartment for the last month. “What have your agents found, Colin?”
“Diana—”
“What?”
He told me, not because of my persistence but because there really wasn’t any reason not to. He even gave me the lattitude and longitude, to the minutes and seconds. Proud of himself. And yet, somehow, not. I listened harder.
“Just what you suspected, Diana, an underground lab. Shielded. We broke the shield half an hour ago, once we knew the general area to look. The Supers had fled, but the duragem dissembler originated there, all right. Bastards didn’t even bother to destroy the evidence. The dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff in that lab…”
I had never seen words fail Colin Kowalski before. He didn’t sputter, or twitch. Instead his mouth just clamped shut on the last word with a small audible pop! as if naming these words had hurt his lip and he was protecting it. I felt sick inside. The dangerous recombinant and nanotech stuff. . . “What else have they got cooked up for us?”
“Nothing that’s going to get out,” he said, and looked straight at me. Too straight. I couldn’t tell what the look meant.
And then I could.
“Colin, no, if you don’t examine it all minutely—”
The explosion rocked the cafe, even though we were probably miles away and undoubtedly the GSEA had thrown a blast shield around the area first. But a blast shield only contains flying debris, and anyway nothing really muffles a nuclear blast. People at the foodbelt screamed and clutched their bowls of soysynth soup and soysnth steak. The holoterminal, which was in the food-line half of the cafe and which someone had turned to the National Scooter Championships, flickered momentarily.
Colin said stiffly, “It was too dangerous to examine minutely. Anything could have escaped from there. Anything they were working on.”
I stood up unsteadily. There was no reason for the unsteadiness. I kept my voice level. “Colin — was the lab really empty? Did Miranda Sharifi and the other Supers really get out before you got there? Before you blew it up, I wanted to say.
“Yes, they were gone,” Colin said, and met my eyes so steadily, so guilessly, that I immediately knew he was lying.
“Colin—”
“Your service with the GSEA is terminated, Diana. We appreciate your help. Six months’ pay will be deposited to your credit account, and a discreet and nonspecific letter of commendation provided if you ever want one. You are, of course, constrained from selling your story to the media in any form whatsoever. Should you break this prohibition, you could be subject to severe penalties up to and including imprisonment. Please accept the Department’s warmest thanks for your assistance.”
“Colin—”
For just a second there was a flash of a real person on his face. “You’re done, Diana. It’s over.”
But, of course, it wasn’t.
I slipped through the general street pandemonium — reporters, townspeople, agents, even the first sightseers on the newly fixed gravrail — without notice. In my rumpled winter jacks, a scarf over the bottom half of my face, my hair as dirty as everyone else’s in East Oleanta, I looked like just one more confused Liver. This might have pleased me, if I had been capable of being pleased by anything just then. Something was terribly wrong, wrong in my head, and I didn’t know what. I had gotten what I wanted: Huevos Verdes was stopped from releasing destruction such as the dur-agem dissembler. The country, unchanged economic problems notwithstanding, now stood at least a chance of recovery, once the clocking mechanism on all the released dissemblers ran through its set number of replications. Twelve-year-old girls could eat; old men would not have to trudge through the snow along disabled rail tracks, attacked for food. I had gotten what I wanted.
Something was very wrong.
The guards were just leaving Annie’s apartment. I passed them in the hall. Neither one gave me a second glance. Billy lay on the sofa, with Annie seated on a chair at his head, her lips pressed together tightly enough to create a vacuum. Lizzie sat on the floor, gnawing on something that was probably supposed to be a chicken leg.
“You. Get out,” Annie said.
I ignored her, drawing up a second chair beside Billy. It was the same kind of plastisynth chair I’d sat in opposite Charlotte Prescott of the perfect nails, the only kind of chair I’d ever sat on in East Oleanta. Only this one was poison green. “Billy. You know what happened?”
He said, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear him, “I heard, me. They blew up Eden.”
Annie said, “And how’d they know, them, there was anything to blow up? You told them, Dr, Turner! You brought them government men to East Oleanta!”
“And if I hadn’t, you’d still all be starving,” I snapped. Annie always brought out the worst in me. She never doubted herself.
Annie subsided, fuming. Billy said, “It’s really gone, it? They really blew it up?”
“Yes.” My throat felt thick. God knows why. “Billy, that’s where they were making the duragem dissembler. The thing that was causing so many breakdowns. Of all kinds of machinery.”
He didn’t answer for a long time. I thought he’d fallen asleep. His wrinkled eyelids were at half mast, and the sag of his jowls hurt my chest.
Finally he said, almost in a whisper, “She saved old Doug Kane’s life, her… And they were going to save ours, too…”
I said sharply, “How do you know that?”
He answered simply, with a guileness so different from Colin Kowalski’s that English should have different words for it. “I don’t know, me. But I saw her. She was kind to us, her, even though we ain’t got no more in common with her than… than with beetles. They knew things, them people. If you say she made the duragem dissembler, well, then maybe she did, her. But it’s hard to believe. And even if they did make it, them, by mistake, say…”
“Yes? Yes, Billy?”
“If Eden’s all blown up, it, how we ever going to find out how to unmake it?”
“I don’t know. But there were other dangerous nanotechnol-ogy projects under way in … in Eden, Billy. Stuff that if it had gotten loose, could have caused even more destruction.”
He considered this. “But Doctor Turner—”
I said wearily, “I’m not a doctor, Billy. I’m not anything.”
“If the government just goes around, them, blowing up all the illegal Edens, then don’t we lose the good things, us, as well as the bad ones? There was them rabid raccoons—”