“Disagreements?” I asked.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” Leander said, a little too quickly.
“Tamara and Mitchell feel we should open our research to public scrutiny,” Charles said.
“It’s the sanest thing to do,” Kwang said.
“None of this is sane,” Maspero-Gambacorta murmured, folding his arms.
“Whom would we tell first?”
“Earth, obviously,” Kwang said. “I have friends on Earth, people who could help all of us sort these things through — the political problems, the misunderstandings — ”
“Misunderstandings?” I asked.
“I’m not a fool,” Kwang said defensively. “I know what our situation is, but if only we could talk, find common ground… It would make me feel so much better…” Her words faded and she shook her head.
“We’ve been over this time and again,” Leander said.
“It’s a feedback dilemma,” Charles said.
“I know!” Kwang shouted, raising her fists. “They might kill us if they think we know how to kill them… But they won’t kill us if they think we can get to them first. We can’t tell them what we know, because we know how to kill them. And if we tell them, they’ll know how to kill us. That is not sane!”
“I agree,” I said. “The best solution is to let things equalize, cool off.”
“By running away?” Maspero-Gambacorta asked. “Doesn’t seem very adult.”
“Can you think of a better idea?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “A dozen better ideas. None of them supported by Charles or Stephen.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see their value.”
He screwed up his face in frustration. “All right, they’re idealistic, screwball risks, not better ideas. But maybe if we tried one of them, we would sleep better nights!”
“The point is not for us to sleep better,” I said. “It’s for Mars to live, and live free.”
“We’re all working as hard as we can,” Kwang said. “Don’t think just because we disagree, we’re not doing our work.”
“I don’t think that,” I said. “If you come up with a better idea — idealistic or cynical or whatever — please let me know.”
Royce sat emphatically, arms still folded, and said, “All right. Over with? Can we get back to work now?”
“We’ve got about four more weeks before we have no secrets whatsoever,” Ti Sandra said at the beginning of our next daily conference call. Alone in my quarters, surrounded by hollow sounds of construction echoing through the soil into the tunnels, I watched Ti Sandra’s range of expressions as I might examine the face of an idol, hoping for clues. “It’s time to survey,” she said. “Take Phobos to our suggested destination. People will notice that a moon has been borrowed, so we’ll need to have the moon back before any alarm is raised. The trip must take less than five hours.”
“Charles and I have discussed the details. He thinks we can manage,” I said. “I want to go with them.”
“Why?” Ti Sandra said.
“I won’t even think about sending Mars someplace unless I’ve been there first.”
“Point One will have a fit.”
“Then we just won’t tell them,” I said.
Ti Sandra considered for a moment, weighing risks against advantages. “You’ll go with them. I want somebody I can trust implicitly. As far as I’m concerned, you’re flesh of my flesh.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’d like to put a tweaker team on Deimos as well. If you don’t come back, or come back too late, we’ll move Deimos into the Belt, hide it, and prepare for the worst.”
The prospect of using Deimos as a backup — no need to specify for what purpose — seemed almost normal, not in the least disturbing.
“Are we telling them that Phobos is moving?”
“We owe them that much,” she said. “Whether they’ll believe we’re not attacking, I can’t predict.”
I told her about Wachsler’s continuing objections, about the growing spirit of resistance among the Olympians and some of our closest advisors and aides.
“Just what I expected,” she said. “I’d join you if I could. Help you state our case a little more firmly. But you can do it. They’ll come around.”
I felt my sense of urgency might not be communicating over the vid display. “It may not be that easy. Think of what we’re suggesting.”
“It scares the hell out of me,” Ti Sandra said. “Maybe they’re so scared they’d rather trust Earth?”
“It’s a natural reaction.”
“Is everybody forgetting so quickly?”
“I hope not,” I said.
“Some folks didn’t lose much,” Ti Sandra said with a touch of bitterness. “Keep fighting and persuading, Cassie. Keep your believers enthused. Send them out as proselytizers, if you can spare them.“
“Another campaign,” I said.
“It never ends,” Ti Sandra said.
“Sometimes I feel like such a monster, even contemplating this. Couldn’t we investigate the possibility of having a plebiscite?”
“How much time do we have?”
“Charles gives Earth a month, maybe two, with the clues they have… And he doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there are spies here. It could come much sooner. Oh, God. There is so little choice.”
“Exactly,” Ti Sandra said. “You and I are expendable. We’re working to save everybody else. Remember that, honey.”
“We need you here so much,” I said, my voice breaking. “There’s so little to keep me going any more.”
“I’m healing as fast as I can. You hold on. You’re strong.”
Just hours before dawn, on the twenty-third of Aquarius, five of the Preamble team — -Charles, Leander, myself, and two astronomers — boarded a tractor and crossed a kilometer along a new-carved track from Kaibab to a hidden Mercury launch site.
The astronomers I had met two hours before. They had just arrived from UMS. The elder of the two, Jackson Hergesheimer, specialized in the study of extrasolar planets. He had originally come from the Moon and had no BM affiliation. UMS had invited him to join the faculty twenty years ago. He was tall, knobby, gray-haired, with a worried monkey-like face and large hands.
His assistant, Galena Cameron, had come from the Belt five years before to study at Tharsis Research University . She specialized in the engineering of deep-space observatories. Some of the equipment being brought on board was hers: prototype sensors for the Martian SGO, Supraplanar Galactic Observer, a multi-BM prestige project whose launch had been postponed nine times in the past five years. Hergesheimer seemed unimpressed by what we were going to do — hiding his fear, I suspected — but Cameron’s face sported a rosy flush and her hands could not stop moving.
The launch pad revetment appeared as low dark mounds in our searchlight beams. The Mercury itself lay under a simple soil-colored tarp — the merest of camouflage. Clearly, there had been only a knee-jerk attempt to disguise what was happening here. Equally clearly, observers from the Belt or Earth or points between would have to track hundreds of such launch sites. Martian orbital space was still open to all former BMs, many of whom stubbornly maintained separate orbital shuttle fleets. A launch from what had been disguised as a reopened mining station on Kaibab plateau would not, in itself, attract attention.
The tractor driver, Wanda, a stocky, athletic woman in a bright green thermal suit, looked over her shoulder at us and smiled. “You need to be up and out in thirty minutes. Once you reach orbit, you’ll be given clearance by direct link. When you get back, we’ll use direct link to tell you where to land. We don’t want Terries tracing Mercury back to Preamble.”
“Direct link” was code talk for instantaneous communications using the tweaker. We would be using “direct link” for the first time, but only from orbit.
Charles thanked her and patted her shoulder. “Wanda was our tractor driver on the first jaunt,” he said. “We’re getting to be old hands at this.”