Now, four years later, Roderick Bantry nodded reluctantly. “Well, either Bruce is very observant, or I’m a stupid loudmouth. But he’s absolutely right. We’re going to give a demonstration at the annual astrophysicists meeting at the University of London next month. Prince Richard is a highly regarded astrophysicist, you recall, very distinguished in the field. We’ll bring him in on center stage for some major public relations work. And we’ll instantly hand out to the media several thousand complete plans for building your own handy-dandy scanner. I think our asses ought to be covered if we spread the credit around broadly enough and quickly enough. No one’s going to try to suppress a member of the Royal family. Not even the Federation.”
“You’d be safer still if you’d let Bonnie Prince Richard take all the credit for himself and you and your toothy smile discreetly faded from the picture. I say that seriously, Roderick.”
Bantry flashed a brief, wintry smile, then tossed his hand with a flash of the old arrogance that Sam remembered so well. “No, Sam. I want that Nobel. Not only want it, I need it. I told you: Linda’s already spent most of it in advance.”
“Well, I guess I can’t begrudge you that. But you’re certain you’ve arranged things so that it’s clear the discovery was made while using the O-CLIP in Hawaii? There’s nothing at all that can trace it back to… to anywhere else?”
“Nothing at all,” said Bantry with absolute certainty. He glanced over his shoulder, then leaned forward so that his face filled the entire screen. “Everyone here knows that I stumbled across it in the Keck Observatories entirely by accident. That accident and everything that follows from it has been minutely documented and recorded a million ways from Thursday. Sam, I was very, very careful.”
“Mmmm.” Sam pursed his lips. “Let us fervently hope so. Now let me change the subject a bit. You remember when I told you that if you could improve the range, we could use our… various facilities to keep an eye out to see if the Federation or anyone else was getting ready to come down our throats? Did you?”
“Did I improve the range? Yes. I still don’t know much more about how the damn thing works than I did before, but the range was no problem at all. Once I got some of the other University people involved with it, we miniaturized a bunch of graviton readers and put them in geosynchronous orbit along with some of our regular equipment.”
“What?” Sam was genuinely startled. “You’ve got this stuff up in orbit? Right now?”
Bantry grinned. “Sure, why not? The new readers only weigh a couple of pounds of apiece. Seticorp is always paying someone to put up tiny little payloads to help us with our search for little green men on the other side of the Galaxy. We just stuck some of our readers in with the other stuff. Nobody even knows about it except a handful of us here on Big Island.”
“Geosynchronous orbit: doesn’t that mean that with three or four of them you can blanket the entire world? That means that you could be sitting there on your volcano halfway around the world looking in on what I ate for breakfast this morning?”
“Or who you spent last Saturday night with in that hot-sheet motel down the river in Virginia,” said Bantry with a savage laugh.
“Um,” muttered Sam. “Well, we always knew that this was what it was going to come to. And why our throats are in imminent danger of being slit. All right, that’s one of the two did yous. What about the other one?”
“What other one?” Bantry was frankly baffled.
“Did you use this expanded range to keep tabs on the Federation, particularly the security office? To see if they’re planning any—”
“Oh.” Bantry scowled and suddenly seemed less sure of himself. “Well, I thought about it. I thought about it for a long, long time. And what I decided was this-, if I used the scanner to spy on them, and then the scanner was made public, eventually they’d use it to spy on me spying on them, if you see what I mean. Which would just give them another incentive for banning it altogether. For the same reason, I haven’t used it to watch what goes on in the bedrooms of the rich and beautiful. I just don’t want to give them incentives.” He looked at Sam as if seeking absolution and his voice was little more than a whisper. “Sam, do you think I was right?”
Sam exhaled in noisy exasperation. “I don’t know, Roderick,” he said after a while. “I’ve got to admit that some of the same thoughts passed through my own mind every time I thought about that O-CLIP sitting right there next door to us in the clinic. Sometimes it’s been awfully tempting to let Bruce loose on it to see what we could see. But—” he shrugged “—finally, I didn’t. Like you, I decided it was just a little too dangerous.” He exchanged a long, speculative look with Roderick Bantry. “I just hope we weren’t wrong.”
“Sorry, dear,” said Sam ten days later. “I still can’t tell you when I’ll be home. This damn filibuster looks like it might actually go on for another couple of months.”
“You mean nobody has changed her mind?” Marianna demanded incredulously. The sharply chiseled features of Sam’s beautiful Brazilian-born wife looked out of his deskphone. Twenty years younger than Sam, she was sunny, totally extroverted, athletic—and absolutely uninterested in politics. “Then when is it going to end?”
“Probably when one of us drops dead—literally. All of us here are pretty stubborn cusses.”
“Don’t say that! There was another one of those awful men in a ski mask on my wristphone cursing and threatening us if you didn’t change your vote. Sam, how do they activate the emergency override? I thought you could block your phone off to anyone you wanted to. And why can’t they trace where they’re calling from? And stop them! It must be against some law to threaten United States senators!”
Sam sighed. The FBI had quickly determined that somehow the calls were being surreptitiously inserted into the global communications network somewhere overseas—and absolutely nothing else. “Well—” he began.
“Oh, Sam, I don’t see why you want to be a senator in the firsf place! Why don’t you just retire and go fishing with Bruce and… and… just stop being a senator!”
Sam had to keep himself from audibly sighing a second time. How to tell Marianna—or Bruce and Emily—that the only reason he clung so tenaciously to this thankless job in Washington was that as a United States senator he could protect the three of them from the Federation and its lackeys a helluva lot more vigorously than if he were merely private citizen Sam Ferron of Eagle Nest Lake, New Mexico, population 768.
Or so he told himself. Right now he didn’t seem to be doing a terribly effective job of it.
“We’ll talk about it when I get home, dear. But I certainly do agree with you: there’s got to be a better way of making a living.”
Like finding out from Roderick Bantry how he was coming along with the public introduction of the scanner in London seventeen days from now. Sam told his commcent to call Bantry at his observatory office. A moment later he was looking at a printed message saying that Roderick Bantry was out of his office.
Sam grimaced in annoyance. It was hard enough trying to figure out when an astronomer might be at work in the first place; it was even harder when there was a six-hour time difference involved. “The hell with it,” he muttered. “Call Bantry on his wristphone. Use the private emergency number.”