“We’re certain,” I said, tensing my thighs again.
“But where will you go?” DeLaTorre cried. “What will you do?”
“What all newborns do. We’ll examine our nursery. The Solar System.”
Silverman kicked off suddenly, jaunting to the empty fourth wall. “I’m very sorry,” he said mournfully. “You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
There was a small Beretta in his hand.
V
There was a calculator in his other hand. At least, it looked like one. All at once I knew better, and feared it more than the gun.
“This,” he said, confirming my guess, “is a short-range transmitter. If anyone approaches me suddenly, I will use it to trigger radio-controlled explosives, which I placed during the trip here. They will cripple the ship’s computer.”
“Sheldon,” DeLaTorre cried, “are you mad? The computer oversees life support.”
“I would rather not use this,” Silverman said calmly. “But I am utterly determined that the information we have heard will be the exclusive possession of the United States of America—or of no one.”
I watched diplomats and soldiers carefully for signs of suicidal bravery, and relaxed slightly. None of them was the kind of fool who jumps a gunman; their common expression was intense disgust. Disgust at Silverman’s treachery, and disgust at themselves for not having expected it. I looked most closely at Chen Ten Li, who had expected it and had promised to kill Silverman with his hands—but he was totally relaxed, a gentle, mocking smile beginning at the corners of his lips. Interesting.
“Mr. Silverman,” Susan Pha Song said, “you have not thought this thing through.”
“Colonel,” he said ironically, “I have had the better part of a year in which to do little else.”
“Nevertheless, you have overlooked something,” she insisted.
“Pray enlighten me.”
“If we were all to rush you now,” she said evenly, “you might shoot perhaps two or three of us before you were overwhelmed. If we do not, you will certainly kill us all. Or had you planned to hold a gun on us for two years?”
“If you rush me,” Silverman promised, “I will kill the computer, and you will all die anyway.”
“So either we die and you return to Earth with your secret, or we die and you do not.” She put a hand on the wall on either side of her.
“Wrong,” Silverman said hurriedly. “I do not intend to kill you all. I don’t have to. I will leave you all in this room. My pressure suit just so happens to be in the next room—I will put it on and instruct the computer to evacuate all the compartments adjacent to this one. I will of course have disabled your own terminal here. Air pressure and the safety interlocks will prevent you from opening a door to vacuum: a foolproof prison. And so long as I detect no attempts to escape on the phone, I will continue to permit food, air and water systems to operate in here. I have the necessary program tapes to bring us back to Earth, where you will all be treated as prisoners of war under international conventions.”
“What war?”
“The one that just started and ended. Have you heard? America won.”
“Sheldon, Sheldon,” DeLaTorre insisted, “what can you hope to accomplish by this insane expedient?”
“Are you kidding?” Silverman snorted. “The biggest component of capital investment in space exploitation is life support. This moon full of fungus is a free ticket to the whole Solar System—with immortality thrown in! And the United States is going to have it, that I promise you.” He turned to Li and Dmirov and said, with utter sincerity, the most incredible sentence I have ever heard in my life: “I am not going to allow you to export your godless way of life to the stars.”
Chen actually laughed out loud, and I joined him.
“One of those Canuck socialists, eh, Armstrong?” Silverman snarled.
“That’s the thing that bugs you the most, isn’t it, Silverman?” I grinned. “A Homo caelestis in symbiosis has no wants, no needs: there’s nothing you can sell him. And he submerges himself in a group: a natural Commie. Men without self-interest scare you silly, don’t they?”
“Pseudophilosophical bullshit,” Silverman barked. “I’m taking possession of the most stupendous military intelligence of the century.”
“Oh my God,” Raoul drawled disgustedly, “Hi Yo Silverman, the John Wayne of the Spaceways. You’re actually visualizing soldiers in symbiote suits, aren’t you? The Space Infantry.”
“I like the idea,” Silverman admitted. “It seems to me that a naked man with a symbiote would evade most detection devices. No metals, low albedo—and if it’s a perfect symbiosis there’d be no waste heat. What a saboteur? No support or supplies required… by God, we could use infantry to interdict Titan.”
“Silverman,” I said gently, “you’re an imbecile. Assume for a moment that you can bludgeon GI Joe into letting what you call a fungus crawl up his nose and down his throat. Fine. You now have an extremely mobile infantry man. He has no wants or needs whatsoever, he knows that he will be immortal if he can avoid getting killed, and his empathic faculty is at a maximum. What’s going to keep him from deserting? Loyalty to a country he’ll never see again? Relatives in Hoboken, who live in a gravity field that’d kill him?”
“Laser beams if necessary,” he began.
“Remember how fast we were dancing there before the end? Go ask the computer whether we could have danced around a laser beam—even a computer-operated one. You said yourself we’d be bloody hard to track.”
“Your military secret is worthless, Silverman,” Tom said.
“Better minds than mine will work out the practical details,” he insisted. “I know a military edge when I see one. Commander Cox,” he said suddenly, “you are an American. Are you with me?”
“There are three other Americans aboard,” Cox answered obliquely. Tom, Harry, and Raoul stiffened.
“Yeah. One’s got a pregnant Canadian wife, two are perverts, and all three are under the influence of those alien creatures. Are you with me?”
Bill seemed to be thinking hard. “Yeah. You’re right. I hate to admit it, but only the United States can be trusted with this much power.”
Silverman was studying him intently. “No,” he decided, “no, Commander, I’m afraid I don’t believe you. Your oath of allegiance is to the United Nations. If you had said no, or answered ambiguously, in a few days I might have believed a yes. But you are lying.” He shook his head regretfully. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, here is how we shall proceed. No one will make a move until I say so. Then, one at a time, on command, you will all jump to that wall there with the dancers, farthest from the forward door. I will then back out this door, and—”
“Mr. Silverman,” Chen interrupted gently, “there is something everyone in this room should know first.”
“So speak.”
“The installations that you made at Conduits 364-B and 111-A, and at the central core, were removed and thrown out the airlock some twenty minutes after you completed them. You are a clumsy fool, Silverman, and an utterly predictable one. Your transmitter is useless.”
“You’re lying,” Silverman snarled, and Chen didn’t bother to answer. His mocking smile was answer enough.
Right there Silverman proved himself a chump. If he’d had the quickness to bluff, to claim other installations Chen didn’t know about, he might even then have salvaged something. I’m sure he never thought of it.
Bill and Colonel Song made their decisions at the same instant and sprang.