“Everyone at the Mauna Kea observatories, Horst? Everyone at the University of Hawaii? Everyone in the United States Senate? The royal family in England? You can’t do it, Horst, not even the Federation can do all that.”
Helmstreit sighed softly. “I have nothing more that I’m allowed to say, Sam.”
“Then take this message back for me: You can’t put the genie back into the bottle. Particularly when it’s the most powerful genie since atomic energy.”
“No? Well, it certainly seems as if we’re going to try.”
Sam threw his arms around both Marianna and Bruce and squeezed tightly. Emily stood to one side and watched with an indulgent smile. “Everything’s all right?” he asked.
“It’s wonderful!” enthused Marianna, gesturing at the eighty-room stone mansion that loomed behind them in the sunny forest clearing.
“Well, it ought to be wonderful. This is where they bring Presidents to protect them when assassination threats seem really serious. I think it used to be the summer home of a Mellon or a Carnegie.”
“And they’ve got two O-CLIPs here!” marveled Bruce. “Two!”
“That’s what I heard,” said Sam softly. He lowered his voice even more. “Any chance of sneaking the use of one, even for a little while?”
Bruce shook his head. “I’ve been asking and asking.”
“So much so that now they’ve posted a real, live FBI man in front of each of them,” said Emily with a hard edge to her voice. “Ones that aren’t Linda Rawlings, either.”
Sam nodded. “And the one back at the clinic? Any chance at all of getting to it?”
Emily shook her head. “I’ve been meaning to tell you: it was physically sealed by three treasury agents with a court order about six hours ago. You’d need a crew of workmen and a truckload of power tools to get into it. I think the Administration really wants you to change your vote, Pop.”
“Damn! That’s what I’ve been afraid of: the final proof that the Administration is already in the hands of the Federation. Well…” Sam sighed heavily.
Marianna squeezed his arm. “Sam, what is this all about?”
“I’m going to have to borrow Bruce for a while. And then we’re going to have to find a functioning O-CLIP somewhere—secretly.”
“But… but why?”
“The Federation is moving fast—and ruthlessly. The FBI tells me that eleven people who were professionally connected with Roderick in Hawaii have disappeared in the last twenty-four hours, just the way he and Linda have. We’ve managed to get the rest of them under protection, but it may already be too late.”
“Then… then they really are trying to suppress—”
“Why do you want Bruce?” Emily cut in.
“I wish to hell I didn’t, but he knows a thousand times more about computers than I do and I can’t think of any other way of giving us even a fighting chance. And even that’s probably the wrong word. The chances are one in a million that we can even get it to work—and then one in a billion that we can save Roderick and the others.”
“Rod—” Emily faltered on the name of the man she had once loved.
“I don’t care about Roderick,” snapped Marianna, “I care about you and Bruce! Be careful, Sam!”
He nodded grimly. “I will,” he promised, wrapping his arm protectively around his son. “But if we can’t save Roderick…” He broke off, unwilling to finish his sentence.
… What chance have we got of saving ourselves?
Fourteen frantic hours later, Sam and Bruce stood in an instrument-laden room three miles from the French-Swiss border—and three thousand feet underground.
To no one’s astonishment, the French, of all the Europeans, had been the most adamantly opposed to the delegation of even the slightest of national prerogatives to the Federation. Two governments had fallen, one prime minister had been assassinated, and a near-revolution had paralyzed Paris for three weeks before they had finally been coerced into joining their neighbors in surrendering vital parts of their sovereignty. It was not surprising that an underground network of anti-Federationists supported by the very highest political levels had come into being.
“We managed to keep one O-CLIP hidden from the Federation when they did their inventory of the Ministry of Statistical Analysis,” said Colonel Lucienne Favre-Trognon with icy satisfaction. She was an attractive but grimly efficient military intelligence officer whom Sam had met two decades before during his pursuit of the world’s painlusters. “We cannibalized enough so-called defective parts from all over Europe and Africa to make this one working model without, we hope, leaving any paper trail.”
“Very efficient. We tried to do the same sort of thing in the States but I don’t know how well we actually succeeded. And with the present Administration, anything we did hide will probably be turned over to them anyway.”
“Politicians.” Colonel Favre-Trognon curled a disdainful lip, then turned businesslike. “That suitcase there contains everything you need?”
“Almost certainly not. We brought it more to give you a demonstration than for anything else.” Sam gestured at the four other military officers and three civilians who stood regarding him with openly skeptical expressions. “Once Bruce has shown what he can do with this four-year-old model, we hope to have bought your indulgence—as well as your expert help—in trying to link up with what Bantry says is now a global network.”
“And whether you succeed or not, you will leave us this obsolete… graviton reader did you call it?”
“Yes. That’s the bargain we agreed to. Lend us your O-CLIP, we’ll give you our reader.”
“This still sounds like the greatest of nonsense to me,” protested one of the civilians. “First you will have to demonstrate the reality of this… magical device.”
Sam nodded. “Just let Bruce sit at the controls of the computer and I’ll start feeding him data from the reader. But don’t expect too much. This is the same old reader Bantry left with us at the clinic four years ago—as I recall, its final range was only about seventy feet and forty-two hours into the past.”
But a few minutes later that was enough to elicit astonished cries from some and stunned silence from the others. “That… that really is me walking into the room yesterday morning!” Colonel Favre-Trognon stared incredulously at the jerky, black-and-white image of herself on the computer’s monitor. “Look, you can see from the headline that I’m carrying yesterday’s Figaro!”
Bruce reluctantly turned the controls over to a French computer expert, then stood behind him fidgeting impatiently while the officer slowly moved the image on the monitor out into the nearest corridor and then nearly two days into the past.
“But we’re buried here under one thousand meters of the Jura Mountains,” shouted one of the officers petulantly. “How can these… these gravitons do… penetrate… reveal… do—” He sputtered off into baffled silence.
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “And I don’t think Bantry does either. And all I know about gravitons is what I’ve had drummed into me: that they have an indefinitely long lifetime, zero electric charge, and zero rest mass. And that just as there’s no light without photons, there’s no gravity without gravitons.”
“But still it works,” marveled the man at the controls, “still it works!”
Sam allowed himself a thin smile. “It works if all you want to do is look at a hidden room somewhere under the Jura Mountains. What I hope is that you and Bruce can extend its range a trifle.”