That was all the spark needed. Walton edged away surreptitiously and watched it spread through the crowd, while the little man’s harangue grew more and more inflammatory.
Until a rock arced through the air from somewhere, whipped across the billowing UN flag, and cracked into the side of the building. That was the signal.
A hundred men and women converged on the little man on the battered chair.“We have to face the truth!” the harsh voice cried; then the flags were swept down, trampled on. Flagpoles fell, ringing metallically on the concrete; the chair toppled. The little man was lost beneath a tide of remorseless feet and arms.
A siren screamed.
“Cops!” Walton yelled from his vantage point some thirty feet away, and abruptly the crowd melted away in all directions, leaving Walton and the little man alone on the street. A security wagon drew up. Four men in gray uniforms sprang out.
“What’s been going on here? Who’s this man?” Then, seeing Walton, “Hey! Come over here!”
“Of course, officer.” Walton turned his collar down and drew near. He spotted the glare of a ubiquitous video camera and faced it squarely. “I’m Director Walton of Popeek,” he said loudly, into the camera. “I just arrived here a few minutes ago. I saw the whole thing.”
“Tell us about it, Mr. Walton,” the security man said.
“It was a Herschelite,” Walton gestured at the broken body crumpled against the ground. “He was delivering an inflammatory speech aimed against Popeek, with special reference to the late Director FitzMaugham and myself. I was about to summon you and end the disturbance, when the listeners became aware that the man was a Herschelite. When they understood what he was advocating, they—well, you see the result.”
“Thank you, sir. Terribly sorry we couldn’t have prevented it. Must be very unpleasant, Mr. Walton.”
“The man was asking for trouble,” Walton said. “Popeek represents the minds and hearts of the world. Herschel and his people seek to overthrow this order. I can’t condone violence of any sort, naturally, but”—he smiled into the camera—“Popeek is a sacred responsibility to me. Its enemies I must regard as blind and misguided people.”
He turned and entered the building, feeling pleased with himself. That sequence would be shown globally on the next news screenings; every newsblare in the world would be reporting his words.
Lee Percy would be proud of him. Without benefit either of rehearsal or phonemic engineering, Walton had delivered a rousing speech and turned a grisly incident into a major propaganda instrument.
And more than that, Director FitzMaugham would have been proud of him.
But beneath the glow of pride, he was trembling. Yesterday he had saved a boy by a trifling alteration of his genetic record; today he had killed a man by sending a whispered accusation rustling through a mob.
Power. Popeek represented power, perhaps the greatest power in the world. That power would have to be channeled somehow, now that it had been unleashed.
The stack of papers relating to the superspeed space drive was still on his desk when he entered the office. He had had time yesterday to read through just some of the earliest; then, the pressure of routine had dragged him off to other duties.
Encouraged by FitzMaugham, the faster-than-light project had originated about a decade or so before. It stemmed from the fact that the ion-drive used for travel between planets had a top velocity, a limiting factor of about ninety thousand miles per second. At that rate, it would take some eighteen years for a scouting party to visit the closest star and report back… not very efficient for a planet in a hurry to expand outward.
A group of scientists had set to work developing a sub-space warp drive, one that would cut across the manifold of normal space and allow speeds above light velocity.
All the records were here: the preliminary trials, the budget allocations, the sketches and plans, the names of the researchers. Walton ploughed painstakingly through them, learning names, assimilating scientific data. It seemed that, while it was still in its early stages, FitzMaugham had nurtured the project along with money from his personal fortune.
For most of the morning Walton leafed through documents describing projected generators, types of hull material, specifications, speculations. It was nearly noon when he came across the neatly-typed note from Colonel Leslie McLeod, one of the military scientists in charge of the ultra-drive project. Walton read it through once, gasped, and read it again.
It was dated 14 June 2231, almost one year ago. It read:
My dear Mr. FitzMaugham:
I’m sure it will gladden you to learn that we have at last achieved success in our endeavors. The X-72 passed its last tests splendidly, and we are ready to leave on the preliminary scouting flight at once.
It was followed by a note from FitzMaugham to McLeod, dated 15 June:
Dr. McLeod:
All best wishes on your great adventure. I trust you’ll be departing, as usual, from the Nairobi base within the next few days. Please let me hear from you before departure.
The file concluded with a final note from McLeod to the director, dated 19 June 2231:
My dear Mr. FitzMaugham:
The X-72 will leave Nairobi in eleven hours, bound outward, manned by a crew of sixteen, including myself. The men are all impatient for the departure. I must offer my hearty thanks for the help you have given us over the past years, without which we would never have reached this step.
Flight plans include visiting several of the nearer stars, with the intention of returning either as soon as we have discovered a habitable extra-solar world, or one year after departure, whichever first occurs.
Sincere good wishes, and may you have as much success when you plead your case before the United Nations as we have had here—though you’ll forgive me for hoping that our work might make any population equalization program on Earth totally superfluous!
Walton stared at the three notes for a moment, so shocked he was unable to react. So a faster-than-light drive was not merely a hoped-for dream, but an actuality —with the first scouting mission a year absent already!
He felt a new burst of admiration for FitzMaugham. What a marvelous old scoundrel he had been!
Faster-than-light achieved, and the terraforming group on Venus, and neither fact released to the public… or even specifically given to FitzMaugham’s own staff, his alleged confidants.
It had been shrewd of him, all right. He had made sure nothing could go wrong. If something happened to Lang and his crew on Venus—and it was quite possible, since word from them was a week overdue—it would be easy to say that the terraforming project was still in the planning stage. In the event of success, the excuse was that word of their progress had been withheld for “security reasons.”
And the same would apply to the space drive; if McLeod and his men vanished into the nether regions of interstellar space and never returned, FitzMaugham would not have had to answer for the failure of a project which, as far as the public knew, was still in the planning stage. It was a double-edged sword with the director controlling both edges.
The annunciator chimed. “Dr. Lamarre is here for his appointment with you, Mr. Walton.”
Walton was caught off guard. His mind raced furiously. Lamarre? Who the dickens —oh, that left-over appointment of FitzMaugham’s.