Castor gave her a sulky look. He tarried long enough to show her that, if he was going, it was because he had decided to go, not because he was ordered. All the same, he did as he was ordered. He complied with the letter of the order. He went away; but not to his own room.
His curiosity had become too great an itch to remain unscratched. He glanced back at the closed door, then stole into Manyface's private study.
What Manyface had that Castor did not was a hundred-channel receptor. Even slaved to it, Castor's satellite screen did not have the range of options that of Manyface possessed. He closed the door of the study behind him and made a systematic search for further news.
There was none. Not on the local channels. Not on the ethnics for the few Amerindians or Mexicans. Not on the ionosphere-relay channels from Home. Not anywhere on any of the scores of stations that Han China broadcast on, for any purpose.
Of course, he told himself irritably, that only meant that it was more interesting! If the news of whatever it was that the highest officials in New Orleans were huddling over was kept from the public, then it must be tremendous news indeed. Frowning, Castor reached to turn the screen off—
Then he thought of something. Han China could control every one of its broadcasts absolutely; but there were parts of the Earth where China's writ did not run.
Even on Manyface's hundred-channel screen, getting one of the Indian channels was hard. Their satellites were weakly powered and their antennae often savagely out of line. When the image came in it was grainy, and the indexing capricious—Castor had to try more than a dozen times to get the story he wanted.
But the story was there.
When at last the index retrieved the proper clip, Castor saw an Indian youth, pomaded hair and dhobi, wearing the sneery kind of smirk that the Indian propagandists always wore when they thought they had something discreditable to say about China. Behind the speaker was a patched-in space shot. Although it was breaking up in the poor transmission from the Indian satellite, Castor recognized the scene. It was the unidentified spaceship. The image was poor, indicating that the picture had been either taken through inferior Indian telescopes or stolen by one of their spies from Chinese sources.
It was what the man was saying that riveted Castor. "The People's Republic of China," he sneered, large lips wrapping themselves around each word before they spat it out, "is once again concealing the truth from its people." Since the satellite was time-locked to the western hemisphere, the announcer was speaking in English—almost accent-free, Castor noticed. "That a message has been received by the Chinese is undeniable, though they have made no announcement of it. We now present you the text of this message—in English, just as you hear it now."
There was a pause, while the sneery face pursed its lips to listen. Then came a recorded voice. "Attention!" it said, tone deep, hoarse, whispery.
There was a pause. The pause filled itself with pictures on the backdrop—a woman in what seemed to be military uniform; another woman, nearly naked, with what looked like a kind of stuffed animal doll on her shoulder, standing next to a sort of great bat or small dragon; a great city, glassy towers all the colors of light, with some of the same creatures wheeling above it.
Then the voice again: "We have a demonstration to offer you, since you doubt our powers."
The sneery face of the Indian announcer nodded and pursed its lips to listen.
"Choose an island," said the other voice. "We will show you our capabilities by annihilating all life on it. Then you will understand that we are serious and that the Chinese invaders must return to their own country. But we will discuss this with only one person, the president of the United States."
The pictures faded. The voice stopped. The Indian announcer was smiling disdainfully. "The 'president of the United States,"' he repeated. "As though there were any such person! No wonder the Chinese warlords have concealed this message! It will be fascinating to watch them wriggle as they attempt to deal with this challenge to their evil hegemony!"
An hour later Castor heard the sounds of the meeting below breaking up. He raced downstairs in time to catch Manyface in sober conversation with Tsoong Delilah. The other great leaders had gone. Castor dared demand, "Is it true, what the Indian satellite broadcast says?"
Tsoong Delilah gave him a look of compassion and fatigue. "It is, Castor."
"And there is a spacecraft that wants the Chinese to leave America?"
"So it seems," she said heavily.
"And they have the power to destroy life on Earth somehow?"
She did not answer. Neither did Manyface. And for Castor that was answer enough.
II
Once the news had been broadcast on the Indian satellite stations, there was no longer any use trying to keep it secret. It was electrifying news. The surge of its power flashed all over the Renmin. Sparks flew in command posts along the Indian border, haloes flickered over the Central Committee, arcs flared about the great Space Center on the island of Hainan. First the high councils knew. Then the middle-level civilians with access to Indian TV.
Then everyone.
The outpost centers in New Orleans and Sydney and Acapulco and everywhere else were sizzling with the electricity of the message from space, and so were all the anthill cities of Han China itself.
When Indian satellite TV broke the story, the leadership was already in session in the Great Hall of the People off Tienanmen Square, though it was nearly four in the morning in Beijing. They received the word at once. "Hindu pigs!" snarled the commissioner for culture, fox-faced and long-haired, descendant of a hundred generations of Kwangsi peasants—and five generations of high party cadres. No one listened to him. What did culture have to do with a threat from space?
Threat it was. Dire. Dangerous. Wholly unexpected and unprovided for, for who could have guessed that that comic and extinct monster the "United States of America" might have spacefaring allies after all these years?—and armed and belligerent ones! Dangerous, unexpected, and sickeningly unfair, too, for what "invasion" had China committed? China had never attacked the U.S.A.! The U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. had committed a messy and mutual suicide, and China had simply spilled over into the hole they left.
The meetings of the high leadership were formal— ritualistic, in fact, as elaborate as a consistory of cardinals. Each cadre had his own page, secretary, and bodyguard, and the debate was usually stately.
But then the debates had always had time to be stately, calculated to the long time spans of ancient China itself. Now there was no time. There was an ultimatum: "Do they mean it?" "Of course, they mean it, pig's dung!" "But can they do it?" "Who can tell?—" There were fears: "If they take America, what next?" "If there is a next, then maybe China itself?—" There were greedy notions born of fear: "But if they are so powerful, and if we can make terms with them, then vis-^-vis the Indians we can wipe them out! If we wish, of course."
So the Highest Councils met and tried to plan and told each other it was unfair... and decided at last what every such nation and person must decide, which was that fairness had nothing to do with it. They didn't decide that easily. They needed help. The mule moves along when you tell him to, but you first have to lay the club across his nose to get his attention; what got their attention was the missile that streaked in out of space across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean and Indochina and the Philippines, and exploded fifteen hundred meters over a Western Pacific Island named Shihiki, just north of Truk. It wasn't a very big island. It wasn't even inhabited, really—not by Han Chinese, at least. But everything on the island died at once.