Hawthorne pursed his lips. With his cold clarity, he analyzed the situation. He nodded. “Very well.”
“Furthermore—what did you say?”
“I agree.”
“You agree to what?”
“Boldness.”
“If this is some verbal trick, General.”
“No. You’re right. This is a time for boldness.”
Director Gannel leaned back. “Uh, yes, yes, good. Very good, General. I’m glad to hear you say that. You are a man of reason after all. I just hope… Well. I’m glad we could have this talk.”
“As am I, Director Gannel.”
Gannel glanced at something in his room that was out of sight of his holo-projector. “I must beg your pardon, General, my agenda forces me to cut the conversation short.”
“Good bye, Director,” said Hawthorne.
The communications ended as the holo-image collapsed into a tiny dot of light and winked out.
It left General Hawthorne silent and thoughtful. He finally rose and began to pace around the holoset. What had Commodore Tivoli told him before her untimely death? There was rioting in New Baghdad, in the capital.
He whirled around and strode for the door.
13.
No one would remember later who ordered the autopsy. But Air Marshal Ulrich’s corpse lay on an operating table deep in Bunker Command’s Medical Facility. Doctor Varro, the two technicians and a nurse discovered an odd reading from Ulrich’s skull. An x-ray showed tiny filaments running through the frontal lobes and a strange little lead device embedded near the pituitary gland.
“Can you make any sense out of it?” asked Doctor Varro. She showed them the x-ray.
The two technicians shook their heads.
“Nurse?”
“It’s ghastly. Sticking things in a man’s brain. Who did it?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Varro, a slender woman, who had helped create over twenty bionic men. “Who indeed?”
“Should we run more tests?” asked the more cautious technician.
Doctor Varro studied the x-ray. What was that little lead device beside the pituitary gland? Her green eyes shone with curiosity. “Get the cranial saw,” she said.
The nurse picked it up, a small circular saw, and handed it to Doctor Varro.
The more cautious technician grabbed the x-ray off the tray and peered at it again. He didn’t like it, not one bit.
The cranial saw whirred into life. Doctor Varro leaned over the skull.
“Excuse me,” said the more cautious technician. He hurried out of the operating room, heading for the lavatory.
Thus, only he survived the explosion that obliterated the corpse’s skull and killed Doctor Varro, the other technician and the nurse. For the next two-and-a-half hours, the more cautious technician retold his story to the MI operatives grilling him on what exactly had happened. Don’t leave out any facts. Do you understand?
He did understand, and he didn’t leave out any facts. Not even the one that he practiced mediation and firmly believed in gut level instincts. Didn’t they trust their own?
They did, so they drugged him, and were surprised to find out he was telling the truth—So much for the instinctual theory.
14.
General Hawthorne paced. The reports lay thick on his desk. A spontaneous riot, they called it. Several directors had fled the city. Their location was presently unknown. Nor had he been able to get through to the Madam Director, who was said to be under siege in the Directorate Complex, on New Baghdad’s ninth level. Her communications were tied up, or else it was very good jamming.
His door swished open and in rushed his wife, Martha Hawthorne. She peered at him, her eyes worried and she came into his arms.
“James,” she whispered.
They kissed and he released her, looking into her face. She was small and in her mid-forties. Still a beautiful woman with dark, shoulder-length hair and deep dark eyes, she wore a modest executive outfit. Their only daughter went to school in Montreal, Quebec Sector. Martha ran financing for Data Corp., but she’d joined him at Bunker Command ever since May 10.
They spoke tenderly, and he unburdened himself. In time, she sat at his desk, scanning the reports. She picked one up, her eyes narrowing.
“Did you see this, James?”
He stopped his infernal pacing to frown at her.
“Cybertanks in the capital,” she said.
“In New Baghdad?” She nodded.
“That seals it then.”
“James,” she said. “You must tread carefully. You know that PHC is already purging the army units you brought over from England Sector.”
“They tried to kidnap me, Martha. Turning Air Marshal Ulrich to do their filthy deeds! They even put electrodes in his brain.”
“But they failed to take you, my dear.”
“Only because of Captain Mune. The rest of the military—” He shook his head. “They’re paralyzed with fear and uncertainty.”
She set down the cybertank report and took to worrying a fingernail with her teeth. Despite his love for her, he disliked watching her do that. It annoyed him, but he’d learned to keep quiet about it. He resumed pacing.
“The bionic men are different,” she said.
“Quite.”
“No. I don’t mean the obvious difference of their bionics. They’re… Everyone hates them.”
He shrugged.
“They hate their strength, their power and bravery.” Her eyes widened. “They hate their individuality.”
“What do you mean?”
“The bionic men are different, James. They’re not SU. Consider: Each has been carefully crafted into a devastating fighting man. He’s unique, a one of a kind. Other people fear them because of that. Because most people are… aren’t unique. Thus, the bionic men avoid the masses, staying among their own. And as if to heighten their differences, the late Lord-Director gathered them into a single unit and gave them vast discretionary powers.”
“Police powers,” said the General.
“No, more an imperial guard power. They were loyal to him, guarded his interests when he wasn’t there.”
“Hmm,” said the General, recalling the horrible asteroid attack on May 10, how Captain Mune had stopped him from launching the nukes that might have broken up the incoming asteroids enough so that the proton beams could have annihilated the separate and much smaller chunks. But the late Lord Director had given a no-nuke launching order without his express permission. They hadn’t been able to contact him, and Captain Mune’s men, bionic warriors, had watched then in the Command Center to insure complete obedience to the Lord Director and his dictates.
The General grimaced. “I take your point.”
“Do you?”
“I can’t do without Captain Mune now.”
“No, dear, you’re missing the point. They’re loyal to you, to you personally. They know they’re hated. And they know you’re the one who saved them from the tribunal. They’re no longer Social Unitarians in thought, if they ever were to begin with.”
The General considered that.
After the late Lord Director’s death, and when Madam Blanche-Aster took over, there had been a tribunal. Someone had to take the official blame for the billion deaths. The bionic guards at the Command Center that day had seemed like the perfect choice. Hawthorne had lobbied hard otherwise, and for good reason.
Before Lord Director Enkov had died, Captain Mune had taken the General to the Director’s HQ. There the captain had shot and killed the Lord Director, because during the trip Hawthorne had convinced him that the Lord Director would sacrifice him, the captain, in order to shift the blame of the stupid no-nuke launch order. Hawthorne had had been certain that he too would be scapegoated, which was why he’d talked so persuasively that day.
When the members of the tribunal had wished to question the bionic security teams, Hawthorne had taken them under his protection. Right after May 10, when he’d quelled the planet-wide riots, his authority had been vast. He’d simply vetoed the tribunal request. He didn’t want to lose his special forces to a witch-hunt, and of course, he’d wanted his role in the… removal of the late Lord Director kept quiet. Later he’d come to incorporate the bionic warriors into his own security arrangements.