“I might as well be frank with you, Mr. Stirling.” Lomax mopped his palms mechanically. “I’ve had a couple of very unpleasant shocks during the past twenty-four hours. To discover a bunch of … hoboes on this He was bad enough. But the fact that you, a newspaperman, got onto them first makes things all the more difficult for me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, it means we may not be able to let you go.” Lomax smiled an apology, whose obvious insincerity made it a threat. “You see, we don’t want to draw attention to our presence here. … So it would hardly be advisable for me to release a reporter with one of the most sensational stories of the century.
“You do see my point of view, don’t you?”
Stirling stood up angrily. “Listen, I’m grateful to you for saving my life. But I don’t see what right you have to even think about keeping me here against my will. The F.T.A. has no power to …”
“Correction, Mr. Stirling.” Lomax stretched his brown lips in another formal smile. “You forget how long you’ve been… shall we say, out of touch? Last month both coastal administrations approved a rationalization program which brought the lies under the Authority’s direct control.”
“All right, so Hodder finally got the lies in his pocket. Where does that leave me?”
“It leaves you in the middle of a quiet revolution, Mr. Stirling. Weren’t you surprised to find us here!”
“I was coming to that.”
“I’ll bring it to you. Do you know what percentage of the country’s food supply comes from the lies?”
“I don’t know. Five? No, I guess that’s too high. One or two?”
“Point oh-oh-two.”
Stirling looked out at Heaven’s blurred horizons in disbelief. “But that’s only…”
“Not worth taking into consideration, is it? And do you know how much it costs to produce a pound of incomplete protein on the lies, compared with extracting a pound of whole protein from the ocean?” A look of expectancy appeared on Lomax’s round face; and Stirling, realizing he was taking part in a set piece, became irritated.
“All I want to know is, what makes you think you can keep me here?”
Lomax frowned. “The lies are finished, Mr. Stirling. The only useful function left to them is to provide living space. That’s what we need more than a few vegetables right now.”
Stirling suddenly saw the light. “Do you mind if I make a wild guess about what you’re going to say next? I imagine that, as the F.T.A. controls these choice pieces of real estate, it has also selected the tenants. Right?”
Lomax nodded, still looking amused.
“And who would it choose but its own executives? If Hodder’s plans work out, there’s going to be a kind of technocracy on both coasts, with the F.T.A. on top … And the lies will become glorified penthouses for Hodder and his puppets.”
“I knew you would understand why we can’t let you go, Mr. Stirling. Under the new legislation there’s nothing really illegal about what we’re doing here, but it will take the great American public some time to get used to the idea. Our public relations agency has barely got started on the job and—with the congressional elections coining up soon—it could be inconvenient for the Authority if you were to talk to the wrong people.”
“I don’t see what you’re worrying about,” Stirling said bitterly. “Your so-called Press Council would block everything I wrote. I’m one of their best customers.”
“You journalists become too wrapped up in the press.” Lomax began drawing the pale green handkerchief between each of his fingers in turn. “You forget about things like whispering campaigns, Mr. Stirling. Public opinion was a potent electioneering weapon long before newspapers were invented.
“The Authority insists on you remaining here as its guest for the time being. But relax. … It won’t be for very long.” How right you are, Stirling thought. He walked to the window and looked out to the spot where work crews were unloading earth-moving equipment from the elevator cars. How right you are.
Stirling found he had been given complete freedom of movement within the building which—when he thought it over—was much better treatment than he might have expected. Lomax and a couple of F.T.A. security men had questioned him closely after dragging him into the safety of their office block; but Stirling had stuck to his story of coming to the lie as a reporter in search of an unusual scoop. His instinctive dislike for anyone connected with the F.T.A. had led him to keep quiet about Johnny and to be vague about the number of people in the village.
Finally, Lomax accepted him at face value; and Stirling got the impression the F.T.A. thought the four men they had captured with him represented the bulk of the He’s unofficial colony. He was content to leave it that way. When the new landlords unexpectedly encountered an army of two hundred shabby guerrillas, their cloak of secrecy was likely to come apart at the seams.
Once free of Lomax, Stirling explored the single-story building. Drafting machines had been set up in some of the rooms, and men in F.T.A. whites were everywhere. Stirling noticed that, in contrast to most citizens of the Compression, the men were tanned; and he guessed they had worked on the processing stations along the coast. That would make them good material for the He: anybody who had been used to seascapes would adapt more easily. He ambled around, ignoring the curious stares from the office workers, until he found the wing which was being used as a temporary prison. The four captured villagers sat disconsolately behind a superglass partition. Stirling surveyed their faces and satisfied himself Johnny was not there; then he noticed the mens movements were limited by webs of silvery streamers clinging around their limbs.
“What’s that stuff?”
The square-faced security man on guard looked coldly at Stirling, but he answered. “We used blotch guns on those guys. Good thing for you we had ‘em too.”
“I appreciate it. Is that a blotch gun?” He pointed at the bulbous weapon of gray metal clipped to the guard’s belt.
“Yeah. Best yet for security work… . Better range than the old bolas guns we used to have, and that solder wraps ‘em up but good.”
“That’s progress for you.”
Stirling stared through the superglass at the villagers. Yesterday they had tried to kill him; today he bore them no grudge. All the rules had been changed. One of the villagers, his lips moving silently behind the screen, looked up, recognized Stirling, and pointed him out to the others. The four faces looked strangely alike: dark-skinned, bearded, hunted, and trapped. Stirling knew none of them by name, and guessed they had been four nonentities who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He moved on and picked a convenient window from which to watch the reconstruction teams at work. They had begun spreading along two strips, dozing the soil into tumbled brown heaps, pouring plastic floors, and erecting wall panels. Beyond the new buildings loomed the yellow structure of an agricultural robot, strangely canted; and showers of sparks fountained up around it from cutting machines. The robot looked oddly dignified in death, and Stirling felt something like regret.
The first battle of International Land Extension, U.S. 23, took place three days later.
An unofficial survey team of three men had headed out across the He early in the afternoon, partly to see the territory for themselves, partly for the pleasure of the ride. Their negative-gravity sled was set to travel about three feet above the level of the soil beds, but it moved with a faint undulating motion due to the interaction of its own field with the beam fields of the He’s substructure. From his vantage point, Stirling saw the men laugh as they discovered the newly arrived sled’s tendency to behave like a roller coaster. He watched the party disappear into the east and wondered, uneasily, how long it would be before the village was discovered. The sled reappeared an hour later, traveling at top speed, rising and falling like a swallow in its skimming flight. Two of the men were slumped in their seats, and their white coveralls were dappled with crimson. The report which filtered down to Stirling was that they had seen a solitary figure moving in the eastern margin, had tried to round him up, and found themselves right in the middle of the village. Only the sled’s impressive acceleration had got them back out of it—and two of the survey team had serious knife wounds.