Their deadly activities. In spite of herself, Delilah shivered. It was so easy, watching buffoons, to forget that these buffoons could be lethal!
She turned to rescue Castor from a prolonged discussion with Big Polly, who had made it clear, these last few days, that even a Second Generation senior sister did not consider herself too old to take an interest in a strange new male, particularly her President. She wondered just what it was that Jupiter was discussing so glumly with Miranda. Sex, no doubt. She thought virtuously that that was about all these weird rebels ever cared about. Well, he was a poor young fool to take an interest in that young hoyden, thought Delilah, but his problems were none of hers. In a matter of a few days at most he would be gone from her life, with all this planet and its capricious, stupid, ludicrous, dangerous inhabitants.
So thought Tsoong Delilah then.
IV
Said Feng Miranda scaldingly to Jupiter, "You're a fool! You don't see that he's planning to betray the mission!"
Jupe groaned. "Ah, you're not going to start that again, are you? Come on, Miranda, let's go watch the last pre-invasion launch. There's a grove of trees just off the field with some very pretty flowers—" Pretty to look at and soft to lie on, he happened to know; but she was too angry to be seduced, it seemed. He said reasonably, "Castor didn't do anything wrong, did he? He put the whole thing to a vote, didn't he? Even Big Polly and the erks voted with him, didn't they?"
"You're a fool!" she blazed.
"You're repeating yourself," he said glumly. "If you're serious about this, why didn't you speak up in the meeting?"
"And let them know I was suspicious?"
He looked puzzled; these refinements of intrigue were beyond him. "Well, at least, uh—at least tell somebody."
"I'm telling you! And you're not listening!"
"I'm missing the launch," he protested, stung—for that was manifestly unfair; certainly he'd been listening, silly though what she said was.
The tiny woman glared up at him, so furious that Jupiter involuntarily backed up a step. Then she said one of those curious words for copulating that the Real-Americans seemed to use in a derogatory way. "Go watch your launch," she snapped and actually pushed him away.
Jupe was getting angry now. "Very well," he said with dignity. "If you're sure—"
"I'm sure."
"All right, only—"
"Oh, go," she cried. "I might as well talk to the erks as you! In fact—" She hesitated, then glanced toward the front of the room, where Big Polly was stuffing papers in her shoulderbag while Jutch and A-Belinka chattered at her. She turned back to Jupiter. "Go watch the launch," she ordered, and although her tone this time was not at all angry, it was also not at all friendly and even less amorous.
So Jupiter whistled for his carry-bird and mounted it, as much confused as annoyed. (But quite annoyed, all the same.) What a strange woman! He caught a glimpse of a couple of working sisters lounging along the mossy bank of one of the drainage streams and almost diverted Flash toward them—why not? One needed copulation now and then, didn't one?—but the mood had left him. He flew the short distance to the edge of the space center, peering out to make sure the launch had not yet gone off.
It had not. That was at least some satisfaction. Jupiter was very nearly as avid a space buff as his President, and besides, he had a special interest in technology. The launch loop, he knew, had an interesting history. It was not a legacy from the Living Gods. The Gods had known no better than to throw their spacecraft into low-World orbit in the same thundering, blunderbuss way as human beings, all fountains of fire and shattering blasts of violent noise.
That was the obvious way to break gravity's grip, so that real space voyages could begin.
It was not, however, the best way. In that case, and a few others, the erks had learned better than their gods ever knew. The war among the hopping crustaceans of the system surrounding an F4 star eighty-five light-years away had not worked out well for the crustaceans. It had, however, left the erks with, among other kinds of booty, a magnetic launch system for spacecraft, one that used every bit of its mechanical energy for the task at hand. The magnetic loop launch was hardly noisy at all. ("Noise" is energy wasted on shaking the air.) The crustaceans had done that task far better than the Living Gods—though the fact that their technology was in other respects not as good was made clear by the fact that none of the crustaceans still survived.
Jupe dismounted, one hand on the carry-bird, to see the launch. The ship to be launched was not truly a dummy, because it carried fuel and supplies to the waiting fleet parked in orbit; but it was matched to size and mass and shape with the Presidential yacht. It was a dry run, to insure that nothing would go wrong in the launch of Castor and his crew. From his post under a peace wood tree, Flash incuriously sampling fresh shoots to pass the time, Jupiter had a good view. The control porch for the launch system was outside the fabrication building, a kilometer and a half away from Jupiter's tree. At that distance the erk and Yank technicians swarming over their instruments seemed tiny and irrelevant. But they were the ones who were making it all happen. All the way across the field the entry end of the launcher loomed gigantic, but what happened there was determined by those tiny figures on the porch. Punch one set of commands, and the grapples picked up the launch vehicle and lifted it to its ready position, just above the smoothly streaming cables of magnetic alloy. Punch out another, and the grapples gently released themselves as they set the vehicle onto the cable itself. The vehicle never quite touched the cable. Magnets held it close to the spinning loop and just above. The cable raced away under the squat, lumpy launch vehicle, but the cable felt the vehicle's presence, and the vehicle felt the cable's tug; strain gauges on the operations platform showed that the cable was pulling three percent more kiloamps because of the new load; accelerometers inside the vehicle reported that it was beginning to move.
Jupiter did not need the telemetry to see that the vehicle was moving. Heartsick as he watched the real launch of a real (if not very important) attack vessel for a real war, he felt like one of the kids with their erk-driven toy bash-'em-up war tanks. True, he had his own command and his own assignment, fifty erks with blasters to come down in the Kweilung area in the third wave. Third wave! By then the action would be over!
So his eyes were fogged with angry tears as he watched the launch vehicle slip away from the hovering grapples, pick up speed, flash down along the long spinning track. From Jupiter's tree it looked like a child's birchbark boat tossed into a stream. It rode the cable to the boost-off incline at the end—
Then it was free.
All instruments on the operations porch reported launch completed. The capsule tore through the sky, its stubby maneuvering fins turning it up and out. In a moment it was gone. Moments later the craaack-boom of its passing the speed of World's sound made all the erks and Yanks giggle and swear and turn to each other in congratulation.
Jupiter had no one to congratulate. He had no special desire to do it, either. How much of his mood was due to the infuriating obstinacy of the Real-American woman Miranda and how much to jealousy of those who would ride the first waves of invasion, he could not have said. He had plenty of both irritations. One hand resting on the wing-root of his carry-bird, he looked on, sick with envy. Flash grunted plaintively, anxious to get back to feeding, if not to the breeding that was her ever-increasing preoccupation. Jupe gave the mount a look of anger. What was the use of a damn carry-bird? These Real-Americans had actual spacecraft! He should have the same, or at least—