"What a stupid question!" he snapped. "Pay attention to what you are doing! Great matters are being decided here and now!"
"Yes," she said reasonably, nodding, "but I would like to know what he was talking about. Can you tell me?"
Delilah paused, holding on to the restraining straps of the copilot's cocoon. "He could, but he won't, Miranda," she said.
"Shut up, you! No talking!" ordered Jupiter, but Miranda warded him off with an upraised hand.
"Why won't he?" she asked.
"Because he does not understand what is happening," said Delilah tautly. "Any more than you do. Ask him about the other erk 'allies.' Ask him how many of them survive."
"What 'allies'?" Miranda asked, frowning as she tried to pursue the subject.
"All of them! And all dead—just as we will all be if this lunatic gets his way!"
"Oh, now, reallyl" howled Jupiter, waving his gun. "How dare you say that? I am no lunatic! You think I am a lunatic simply because I am no traitor to my country!"
"Only to your species," Delilah snarled, but Jupiter was having none of that.
"Now be quiet really," he commanded, "or I will make you so! Go ahead, you! Get over there next to Castor. Miranda! Take the controls. Make sure neither of them gets near them!" His face was tight with rage—what impudence of them! And yet the rage could not long persist in this very best and most exalted moment of his life. He waved the weapons, one now in each hand, to force Castor and Delilah against the far bulkhead of the spacecraft. "Don't try anything!" he warned and, again, "And don't talk!"
It was annoying that they obeyed only the orders they chose. Castor said steadily, "I am the President of the United States. I order you to give me those weapons."
Jupiter frowned. "That's not a proper order," he objected.
"The President is Commander in Chief of all the military forces," Castor said. "Any order I give you must be obeyed."
"Then you're not a proper President!" Jupe decided. "Anyway, I won't. We're going to go through with the plan. We're going to talk to those Chinese ships and tell them to hold their fire, draw them down close to Earth orbit, give the fleet a chance to follow us—and you can't stop it!"
Castor shook his head. "And then what, Jupiter?" he asked.
"Why—then we liberate America, of course!"
"But who is 'we,' Jupiter? Do you mean the erks? Do you know what will happen once the erks get into the fight?"
Jupiter frowned. "Mr. President," he said formally, "I would like to continue treating you as a real President, but I must warn you that to talk treason against the erks is wrong!"
Castor hesitated. Miranda could see that he was sweating. His face was pale and his hands shook, but he said, "You owe no loyalty to the erks, Jupiter. They are not Americans."
"They are our allies!"
"The erks are nobody's allies! Have you ever looked at the histories? Have you seen what the erks have done?"
Jupiter shrugged angrily. "Oh, everyone knows that stuff," he said. "Now be still! Look at the screen—the drones are all around us, and we are nearly within range of the Chinese ships!" As Castor started to open his mouth again, Jupiter shouted, "I said be still. I might not kill you, but I'll surely knock you out!" Delilah touched Castor with a warning hand; the President hesitated irresolutely.
Miranda said suddenly, "Why won't you let him talk, Jupiter? What's he trying to say about history?"
"It is nothing!" snapped Jupiter. "There have been some bad incidents."
"There have been no good ones!" Delilah said, her face almost as strained as Castor's as she stared into Jupiter's guns. "Every time they've intervened in a war, they've destroyed both sides! Is that what you want, Jupiter? The human race wiped out entirely?"
"It won't happen!" he cried, furious at the attack on everything he believed in. "They've had some bad luck."
"Bad luck!" Delilah began, but Miranda stopped her.
"Tell me about this bad luck," she ordered.
Jupiter looked at her sulkily. "It is true that none of the races the erks assisted survived," he said, shrugging. "But we know better. We've had years with them to plan. The whole thing is very clear. First we destroy China from space—what's wrong with that? Perhaps India will want to take over, but they will be even easier to knock out than China. Then we land ground forces for mopping up. True, we can't land more than a few thousand troops, and the erks aren't much good at hand-to-hand combat. But there's always the fleet in space! If the locals don't surrender, we'll just knock out a few cities—"
"Jupiter! What are you saying?" Miranda demanded.
He said mulishly, "They've got it coming." Then he looked surprised as he saw Delilah moving toward the controls. "Don't do that!" he warned.
Tardily Miranda realized that their ship had been slowly swinging around, was now pointed almost directly back at the scout ship, where the pale purple gleam still lingered. Instinctively she reached to stop the swing; and, as she was doing so, Castor leaped toward Jupiter. There was a crackle of high-voltage charge as Jupiter fired. The stun-gun knocked Castor back against the bulkhead, his face a sudden mask of astonishment. Angrily Jupiter swung the gun toward Delilah...
Miranda looked down at what her fingers were doing on the controls and sighed.
"Jupiter," she said absently, "don't shoot anybody else. It doesn't matter anymore."
He turned an amazed face to her. "What?"
"I said it doesn't matter," she repeated, watching her fingers tap out an instruction. As she pressed the Execute key she added, "The erks aren't coming now, you see."
His expression was now as much scared as angry. "What are you talking about, you stupid little sister? Of course they're coming! It's all planned!"
She shook her head and gazed up at the display screen. "Not for a while, Jupe. What is it, forty-two light-years to here? So they can't get here for forty-two years at least without the spaceway." On the screen a tiny white spark of fire was climbing away from them toward the scout ship. "Without the ship there's no spaceway. Without the spaceway, no erks for half a century or so. And," she added simply, watching the spark connect with the blip of the erk scout ship, "I'm a real good shot. So now there's no more ship."
Jupiter gazed pop-eyed at the screen. They all did, even Castor (whose only mobility was in his eyes), even, almost, Manyface, whose bleary old eyes seemed to be straining to focus. What they saw was the same for all.
The erk ship flared bright, actinic white.
When the glare died away, there was no ship there at all. A haze of particulate matter was swelling and dissipating. Nothing else.
"Oh, my God," whispered Jupiter, "you've really done it, haven't you?"
Miranda nodded. It was the simple truth. She had. "I hope I did the right thing," she said meditatively, and Tsoong Delilah, bursting free of the numbed paralysis that had gripped them all, shoved herself toward Miranda and caught her in an unexpected and powerful hug.
"Oh, you did," she said, almost sobbing. "You really did!"
"Traitor!" grated Jupiter. He waved the gun helplessly at the two women, stared at it, then hurled it across the chamber. It barely missed Miranda, who retrieved it and handed it to Tsoong Delilah. "I hope you do better," she said. Then, thoughtfully, to the Chinese woman, but also to the whole of humanity, "I hope you do better than anyone ever did before."
"And if they don't?" demanded Jupiter. "If they just keep on having wars?"
Miranda leaned forward to call the distant Chinese vessels. Over her shoulder she said, "Why, then we deserve what we get, don't we?"