“How much Don’t Touch are we going to need?” Domino was saying to him.
“Just enough to twitch a muscle,” Michaelmas replied. “On request or on the word crowded. ”
“ Crowded. Good enough,” Domino said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go heavier than that?”
Every so often, the idly curious person or the compulsive gadget-tryer wandered over to where the terminal might be lying, and began poking at it. A measured amount of this was all to the good, but it was not something to be encouraged. There were also occasional times when the prying was a little more purposeful, although of course one did not lightly ascribe base motives to one’s fellow news practitioners. And conceivably there might be a time when the sternest measures were required.
The terminal operated on six volts DC, but it incorporated an oscillator circuit that leaked into the metal case when required to do so. It was possible to deliver a harmless little thrum, followed by Michaelmas’s solicitous apology for the slight malfunction. It was also possible to throw someone, convulsive and then comatose, to the floor. In such cases, more profuse reaction from Michaelmas and a soonest-possible battery replacement were required.
“It will do.”
“But if you’re going to topple Norwood on camera, you’ll want the effect to be dramatic. You’ll want to make sure the world can readily decide he isn’t really one hundred percent sound.”
“We are not here to trick the world into an injustice,” Michaelmas said, “nor to excessively distress a sincere man. Please do as I say, when said.”
“At times you’re difficult to understand.”
“Well, there’s good and bad in that.” Michaelmas’s gaze had returned to Harry Beloit. He smiled at Harry fondly.
Eleven
Michaelmas and Frontiere stood watching the approach of the umbilical corridor from the gate. “Is it going well?” Michaelmas asked politely.
Frontiere glanced aside at Norwood, who was chatting casually with some of the UNAC people while Luis worked his camera, and then at Campion, who was close behind Luis’s shoulder. “Oh, yes, fine,” he said.
Michaelmas smiled faintly. “My sympathies. May I ride to Star Control in the same vehicle with you and Norwood?”
“Certainly. We are all going in an autobus in any case; we are very proud of the latest Mercedes, which incorporates a large number of our accumulator patents. Accordingly, we have a great many of the vehicles here, and use them at every opportunity, including the photographable ones.” Frontiere’s thinned lips twisted at the corners. “It was my suggestion. I work indefatigably on my client’s behalf.” He glanced at Campion again. “Perhaps a little too much sometimes.”
Michaelmas clapped him on the shoulder. “Be at your ease, Getulio. You are an honest man, and therefore invulnerable.”
“Please do not speak in jest, my friend. There is a faint smell here, and I am trying to convince myself none of it comes from me.”
“Ah, well, things often right themselves if a man only has patience.” Michaelmas caught Clementine’s eye as she stood back beyond Campion and Luis. She had been watching Campion steer Luis’s elbow. Michaelmas smiled at her, and she shook her head ruefully at him. He winked, and turned back to Frontiere. “Have you heard from Ossip? How are the verification tests on the sender?”
Frontiere shrugged. “I have not heard. He was only about an hour ahead of us in bringing it here. The laboratory will be proceeding carefully.”
Norwood’s voice rose a little. He was making planar patterns in the air, his hands flattened, and completing a humorous anecdote from his test-flying days. His eyes sparkled, and his head was thrown back youthfully. You’d trust your life’s savings to him. “Very carefully,” Frontiere said at Michaelmas’s shoulder, “if they hope to contradict him convincingly.”
“Cheer up, Getulio,” Michaelmas said. “The workmanship only looks Russian. In fact, it comes from a small Madagascan supplier of Ukrainian descent whose total output is pledged to the Laccadive Antiseparist Crusade. Or in fact the false voice transmissions did not come from Kosmgorod. No, by coincidence they emanated from an eight-armed amateur radio hobbyist just arriving from Betelgeuse in its spacetime capsule. It has no interest in this century or the next, and is enroute to setting up as god in pre-Columbian Peru.”
“Right,” Domino said.
The umbilical arrived at the aircraft hatch and looked on. A cabin attendant pushed open the door. Michaelmas took a deep, surreptitious breath. The little interlude between taxi-ing to the pad and the arrival of the corridor had ended. Frontiere shook his head at Michaelmas. “Come along, Laurent,” he said. “I wish I had your North American capacity for humour.” They moved into the diffused pale lighting and the cold air.
Waiting for them was the expected thicket of people who really had no business being there, as well as those with credentials or equally plausible excuses. They were being held back behind yielding personnel barriers, and up to now they had stood in more or less good order, rubbing expensively-clad shoulders discreetly, each conscious of dignity and place, each chatting urbanely with the next.
But when the debarking corridor doors opened, they forgot. They became fixated on the slim man with the boy face, and there was nothing tailoring or other forms of sophistication could do about that.
Norwood. It was, indeed, Norwood. Ah.
They moved forward, and where the barriers stopped them, they unhooked them automatically, without looking, staring straight ahead.
“On your diagonal right,” Domino said, and Michaelmas broke off staring at the welcomers and looked. A tall, cadaverous young man in an Alexandria-tailored yellow suit was coming through the second of the automatic clamshell doors into the area. His large, round brown eyes were sparkling. He strode boldly, and he had his thumbs hooked into the slash pockets of his weskit. “Cikoumas.”
“Bust him,” Michaelmas said.
The doors nipped the hurrying young man’s heel. He cried out and pitched forward, arms flailing. His attempt to get at least one elbow down did not succeed; his nose struck heavily into the stiff pile of the carpeting. He struggled facedown, cursing, one foot held high between the doors, but only a security guard moved towards him with offers of assistance and promises of infirmary. He was, after all, at the back of the crowd.
Brisk in the air-conditioning, jockeying for position, the aircraft passengers proceeded to the gate, where cameras, microphones and dignitaries did their work, but not as smoothly as the UNAC press people, who lubricated the group through its passage toward the ground-vehicle dock. Camera crews eddied around the main knot of movement. “The dignified gentleman with the rimless glasses is Mr Raschid Samir, your director,” Domino said. Mr Samir was directing general shots of Michaelmas debarking with Norwood and Frontiere. He had an economy of movement and a massive imperturbability which forced others to work around him as if he were a rock in the rapids. “He will follow you to Star Control with the crew truck and await instructions.”
Michaelmas nodded. “Right. Good.” As they moved out of the terminal building proper, he was concentrating on his position in the crowd while plotting all the vectors on Norwood. Two crews at the nearer end of the dock were covering most of one side of the astronaut as he strode along, grinning and still shaking hands with some of the local UNAC people. Frontiere was staying close to him, thus blanketing most of his right flank. Other camera positions or live observers were covering the other approach angles almost continuously. Michaelmas stepped sideward in relation to a group of press aides moving along beside Campion and Clementine. While they masked him from forward view, he shifted the strap of the terminal from his left shoulder into his hand, and then stepped behind a dock-side pillar. The bus was there, snugged into its bay, white and black, the roof chitinous with accumulators, the windows polarized, the doors folding open now while the party rippled to a halt. Norwood half turned, directly in front of Michaelmas, almost in the doorway, tossing a joke back over his shoulder, one hand on an upright metal stanchion, as the group narrowed itself down to file in. Michaelmas was chatting with a press aide. “We’re crowded here, aren’t we?” he remarked, and laid a corner of the dangling terminal up against Norwood’s calf muscle just below the back of the knee, so gently, so surely, so undetectably that he half expected to hear the pang of a harmonic note. But instead Norwood sagged just a little on that side before his hand suddenly gripped the stanchion whitely, and his toe kicked the step riser. His eyes widened at betrayal. He moved on, and in, and sat down quickly in the nearest of the individual swivelling armchairs. As the bus filled and dosed, and then rolled out through the insulated gates, Michaelmas could see him chatting and grinning but flexing the calf again and again, as if it were a sweet wife who’d once kissed a stranger. I could have done worse by you, Michaelmas thought, but it was nevertheless unpleasant to watch the trouser fabric twitching.