It also had, as noted, servants. What servants! Delilah had never seen their like. These were not peasants hired out of the pig slop. The butler was Singapore-born and Shanghai-bred, but his genes were pure English countryside six generations back and so were his accent and his manners. Not to mention his warm, pale blue eyes and his curly blond hair. All eight of the maids were from New Zealand, mixed Anglo and Maori ancestry. The kitchen help, which had been hired away from the rich suburbs around Benares, were every one French by ancestry and training. All these people contributed all they could to the material well-being of the party from America—such food! Such wonderful, warm, soft, perfumed beds! But they were not what the party was there for; that was training.
And training they got.
First there was pilotage. That was not hard for Delilah, with six thousand flight hours on her log, and not too hard for Castor, with all his lonely hours in front of the teaching screens. For Tchai Howard it was hard, because he had to start from scratch. There were scuba lessons—because scuba diving was the closest easy thing to zero-G—a breeze for Castor, not too hard for Delilah, again a starting-over for Tchai. Martial arts was quite the opposite. Tchai not only didn't need that, he was their instructor—as he was in hand weapons and the concealment thereof, a course that they got whether they needed it or not. Tchai didn't need it, clearly, but he put himself through the same loading and firing and marksmanship and stripping and cleaning drills as the other two.
Almost all of that part of the training was on the Space Center grounds itself, half an hour from home. A smell of petroleum products hung over everything—not from the rockets, but from the crackers that made the liquid hydrogen fuel; by and by no one noticed it anymore. The rest of the cabinet was not required to take any part of the training. Most of them hung around anyhow—especially envious Miranda, who complained endlessly that she was excluded. Even to so unsympathetic an ear as Delilah's: "I deserve to go into space. I want to!"
Rough good humor from Delilah: "No chance, Yankee. You couldn't stand the centrifuge."
"I'll bet I could," Miranda said. It wasn't just her tone that was resentful. Her whole body was tense and angry, thumbnails digging into the nails of her forefingers.
Delilah felt a flash of anger. "No chance anyway! You are disloyal, Feng. What fool would trust you in space? Earn trust, then you may have some chances—possibly!" And flounced off to try her space suit with Castor and Tchai Howard while Miranda glared after her.
The rocket that would carry Delilah, Castor, and Tchai into space was still the tallest object on the field, but as they came out of the space suit workshop Delilah frowned at a second gantry. What were workmen doing there? And then she saw that preparations were being made to install a second rocket, not one of the lesser utility craft but a big one. "What's going on?" she demanded of Tchai Howard, who shrugged.
"Backup," he said.
"Backup for what?"
He looked at her, and then at Castor a few steps away earnestly listening to the complaints of Feng Miranda.
"None of your business," he said and left Delilah to wonder.
Since training was arduous, there was not much time for Delilah to worry about Castor, who shared her bed every night anyway. There was even less time to think about the rest of the world until, waiting for Castor to come out of the shower one night, Delilah absently thumbed on a newscast.
The rest of the world was not idle.
When Castor came back to bed Delilah was sitting upright, glaring at the screen. "Look!" she cried. "The wogs are making trouble!"
"Trouble" was the word for it. It wasn't crisis, wasn't a threat, exactly—certainly wasn't a danger of warfare or anything like that. Well, not immediately, Delilah thought savagely; but perhaps the Indians needed to be taught a lesson! The newscasts were showing "spontaneous" demonstrations against China, not only in Delhi and Calcutta but in the rebuilt cities of Rome and Moscow and a dozen other places. It was hard to piece together, from the voice-overs and statements of public figures, just what was going on; but the outlines became clear.
India had got suspicious. They suspected what was quite true, that the Chinese were in secret contact with the spacecraft. They could not know exactly what the contact meant, but they were worried—hence the "spontaneous" demonstrations to denounce China's "attempt" to "revive" the imperialist United States.
The night went badly for Delilah.
In the morning she demanded admittance to the daily Steering Committee meeting. That was not her right; she was not high enough to have such rights. It was not her duty, either, because her time was taken up with training; but the morning was free, as part of the carefully prepared recreation schedule, and anyway her blazing eyes would have let her in regardless. "I hope," said Tchai frostily, "that you have a good reason for this!"
"The best!" declared Delilah, seating herself on one of the half-dozen chairs in the study—there were only three people present, Tchai and Manyface and the Space Center chief, Mu Dailen. "Why have you not instructed us on the Indian situation?"
"There is no Indian situation," said Tchai frostily. "It is only a nuisance, not important. What is important is your mission."
"You think you can get the spaceship to help you against India, is that it?"
"It is our intention to explore that possibility, yes," said Manyface, smiling at her. "Please, Delilah. Your training is your first priority. We had no wish to disturb it with outside factors."
Tchai was having none of the smiles or pleases. "Enough," he barked. "We are in the middle of important decisions. Tsoong must go."
But Manyface smiled at him, too. "She can stay, Howard. We may want her advice."
What they could possibly want her advice on, Delilah could not guess, since what they were discussing had to do with Tchai's specialty and no one's else. Weaponry! Delilah sat seething as they displayed holograms over the bamboo fireplace. Explore a possibility! An unimportant nuisance! And what was important to them? Was it these weapons that they were hiding inside the spacecraft? Delilah looked at them with disdain. So this was how high party members conducted themselves! Why, they were no more than foolish children! Even the tai chi class of seven-year-olds she could hear faintly beyond the pine grove would not imagine that these peashooters could prevail against a spaceship that had the power to annihilate an island—that claimed that it could annihilate a continent as easily, or a planet! Delilah believed that claim. No. There would be only one useful weapon on that ship, and that would be herself. Castor, a silly figurehead boy. Tchai, a sillier, older one. Their carefully camouflaged guns were as idiotic as the fireplace of bamboo, in a room that never needed a fire, that would burn the house down at the first touch of flame. "I am not useful to you here after all," she said frostily, "so I will go supervise the others."
"Of course," said Manyface, this time managing not to smile, and Delilah managed not to slam the door. It was, of course, not true that she needed to supervise the others; there was nothing to supervise on a free morning. It was unquestionably true, on the other hand, that she had not seen Castor since he disappeared into the shower that morning. Where could he have gone?
He was not in the gun room, though he liked the old one-over-one shotguns the Chinese craftsmen had made and the mean little Uzis that could cut a man in half. He was not in the library—no surprise there, Delilah thought darkly. She walked through them, and the breakfast room, and the halls, as though absentminded in thought. Her eyes were focused, though, and they saw nothing she was looking for.