"Jesus, Steve, it's flooding faster, we can't budge this bastard." Panting, and an iron chung as a prybar broke under the desperate heaving of three strong men. Some of the others were shouldering in to try with their bare hands, screaming in panic.
Hurry up, hurry, up, Armstrong pleaded.
"Jesus! Jeezzzuussss-"
"Sven's dead," Armstrong said hoarsely, throwing off the blanket somebody was trying to put around his shoulders. There were Milice cordoning off the dock; out on the waters he could see divers jumping from a hovering helicopter.
"Oh, honey, no," Alicia said.
"I saw it," Armstrong mumbled. Then he shook himself, stood erect. "Come on, we're getting you and the kids home and then I'm going to get some answers, by God."
They pushed through the awestruck crowd toward the family van: a six-wheeler they used for vacations at their cottage up in the hills. A cameraman tried to work through to them; one of the Milice tripped him, then stamped a boot through the equipment. The sight brought a tiny sliver of chill satisfaction, something to put between himself and the vision of his oldest friend floating dead before a pickup camera… Soothing the children was better, forcing him out of himself.
"Honey, you sure I shouldn't stay?"
"No, not in your condition. Get them back to the house, Fred's sending some of his people over"-his brother-in-law, and a commander in the police-"and stay there until I call. OK, sweetheart?"
She bit her lip, nodded, kissed him and slid into the driver's seat. He waited until the big vehicle was safely out of the parking lot, before he turned and looked at the death of a lifetime's dream. Half an hour, he thought, dazed. Half a flipping hour. It's impossible.
The explosion was not quite enough to knock him down; it did send him staggering half a dozen steps forward. Even as he turned and ran, the van blossomed in a circle of fire as the ruptured fuel-tank blew.
He could hear his children screaming quite clearly over the roar, as he wrenched at the burning metal.
Steven Armstrong was screaming himself as they pulled him away from the wreckage where nothing lived, although not from the pain of his charred hands or the third-degree burns across most of the front of his body. He was still screaming as the paramedics dragged him back, until they hyposprayed enough sedative into his veins to turn a bull toes-up.
"I am ashamed. I have failed," the Meijian said.
Murasaki nodded; they were alone in the plain white room of his lodgings, which with the equipment he had brought was as secure as any building on Sparta. The floor was covered with local bamboo matting; his futon was neatly rolled in one corner, and beyond that there was only the low table between them, an incense burner, and one spray of willow-buds in a simple jar. Sandalwood perfumed the air; a cricket chirped from its tiny cage of silver wire.
"I must expiate my shame," his follower said.
They knelt facing each other across the table, dressed in dark kimonos. The technoninja drew a knife and laid the smooth curve of it on the lacquered wood before him, then began to tie a handkerchief tightly about the base of the smallest finger of his left hand.
"Wait," Kenjiro Murasaki said. For some time they did only that, moving solely to breathe. At last:
"You are in error. You have not failed."
"Roshi," his follower said, bowing his head to the mats between his palms. "Yet Armstrong lives."
"Beware of the illusions of specificity. Although Armstrong lives, circumstance is such that he will serve our purposes none the less. For the Armstrong we wished to die, has died; in his place is born another.
"So."
"So."
Silence stretched.
CHAPTER NINE
Crofton's Encyclopedia of the Inhabited Planets (2nd Edition):
Sparta, Royal University of: Institution of postsecondary education, sole university of the Dual Monarchy of Sparta (q.v.). Founded in 2040, only a few years after the arrival of the first settlers of the Constitutionalist Society (q.v.), the University of Sparta embodies many interesting organizational principles and fulfills a number of functions.
The University is organized as a cooperative corporation, with the Crown, the faculty and individual professors holding shares. Some state revenues are "dedicated" to the University; other sources of income include endowments, extensive property holdings, fees, service charges for research work, and patent revenues. Individual faculty are paid a basic salary, with bonuses determined by number of students enrolled and by a complicated, results-oriented testing process. Some chairs are separately endowed, and the endowing individual or authority may nominate the holder subject to a Dean and Faculty veto.
Enrollment is by two methods; scholarship examination, and fee payment. The scholarship tests are severely selective, but confer free tuition, preference for work-study occupations, and in some cases rent-free student accommodations and a stipend. Those entering via fee payment need not take the entrance exams but may and often are disqualified during their course of study; fees are not refunded. Additional supplements are also offered to those willing to contract for public service work (e.g., primary school teaching in remote locations) after their graduation.
All the common courses are taught, together with some unique to Sparta such as Introductory Military Science; there is no law school, as formal qualifications are unnecessary for practice on Sparta. The University is affiliated with St. Thomas Royal Hospital and the McGregor Oceanographic Institute; it cooperates closely with the research departments of many private businesses, and undertakes contract and freelance research work on an extensive basis. The University also operates an extensive correspondence degree section, and many students take the academic portions of their courses by mail or Tri-V link, coming to the campus only for laboratory work or oral examinations.
There are no sororities and fraternities, although the Candidate Sections of the Phraetries (q.v.) fulfill many of the same functions.
Current enrollment (2090): students, 8,000; post-graduate students and teaching assistants, 2,000; faculty, 998.
"God Almighty, that's gruddy," one of the students said. "Overload gruddy."
Ursula Gordon nodded as she relaxed back into the wicker chair in the student commons. The 'caster himself was obviously shaken as he showed the bodies being recovered from the burnt-out wreckage of the Armstrongs's van.
"I don't know what the planet's coming to," one of the observers said disgustedly, taking another pull at his beer.
Observe, Ursula told herself. That's what you're here for. That and the classes, and hers were over for the morning. They had been interesting… odd mixture of people, too. Mostly young, but with a solid sprinkling of older types; evidently the University ran extension-courses all over the settled portions of the planet, not difficult with satellite communications. No problems about enrolling, either; if you paid your way, you could sign up for any course that had room for you, although the fees were quite high. There were plenty of scholarship students as well, often from poorer Citizen or even transportee families. They did have to pass entrance exams, stiff ones, but their tuition was free and they got first crack at the service-staff jobs that would let you live with modest comfort while you studied. It was a tempting arrangement: leave the Legion, go to the University and eventually become a citizen of Sparta. But there's a job to be done first.
The viewer switched to underwater shots of divers pulling bodies from the wreck of the Alicia, with voice-over commentary on the long slash that peeled open her hull for half its length. Ursula looked aside, out the arched windows. You could tell what the priorities of the Spartan Founders had been; the University had been started almost as soon as the prefab shelters went up. It occupied an inordinate stretch of high-value land, too, down on the southwestern shoreline of the city. Georgian-brick dormitories and white neoclassical lecture halls, flagstoned paths and gardens that were quietly spectacular; without the harsh flamboyance she had been accustomed to on Tanith. From here you could see students strolling along the pathways, sitting on stone benches under trees, eating or flirting, people-watching themselves or indulging in the perennial undergraduate arguments about the Nature of Things. A sailboat was skipped across Sparta Sound, its sails gaily blue and yellow against the forest green of the offshore islands. The air of the winter afternoon was chilly enough to make the walking-out khakis and wooly-pully sweater comfortable; shirtsleeve weather to the others on the verandah. "Yeah, it's tragic, but…" someone was saying. He had a button on his tunic, black with a crimson rim and a red = sign. Then his voice went higher: "Hey, Senator Croser's on!"