Sole fished Pierre’s letter out of his pocket.
And began to tell the tall alien all that he knew of the Xemahoa tribe of Brazil…
Outside, it was full daylight now. The sun shone on to Ph’theri’s ship, on the desert scrub, the peaked mountains beyond. The sky hadn’t a single contrail in it. The area must have been cleared of air traffic.
When Sole had finished explaining—and while people stared at Sole, bemused—Ph’theri considered for a long time. His paper-bag ears crinkled through rapid shape changes as he communicated like a silent ventriloquist with the other Sp’thra.
The alien finally addressed the crowd.
“If this is true, we Sp’thra shall miss the tide. And for the Xemahoa brain unit, we assess the value thus: the transfer to you of interstellar travel techniques, together with the lending of one gasgiant Tide Reader. This ‘package’ will enable your race to reach the Tide Reader star within five of your years and make your own trading arrangements.”
A hush of awe filled the room. The bright sunlight made it a moment of eternity.
Then a groundswell of naked greed took hold of the crowd, and Sole felt himself being clapped and pounded on the back.
“You damn clever bastard,” Sciavoni hissed in his ear. “Was any of that true?”
“But it has to be,” muttered Sole. “Doesn’t it?”
“Sure it does!” Sciavoni laughed.
“Hey, Dr Sole,” another voice insinuated, “we’d better be turning the taps off down Brazil way, hadn’t we?”
“Before we lose our baby in the bathwater, eh?”
An almost hysterical gaiety. Amid it all the tall Sp’thra stood like a gloomy lighthouse in a storm.
As the babble grew deafening, Ph’theri’s ears scaled down to flat cardboard packets.
A sub-committee of the Washington Special Action Group met in a walnut-panelled room with false windows. Views of New England in the Fall surrounded them—a blaze of russet trees, that could change at the touch of a switch to the Everglades, Hawaiian beaches, or the Rocky Mountains.
The President’s Chief Scientific Adviser, a German emigré with a leonine head of white wiry hair, said:
“There’s a hell of a lot more to it than just snatching a couple of Indians. We’ve got to safeguard our assets—and if these Indians have stumbled on to something so unique that it’s worth the secret of star flight to our friends, then we need it too—”
“We’re going on pretty slender evidence. A letter from a crazy Frenchman full of propaganda,” said a quiet man from the CIA, who’d been doodling on his notepad, producing a series of awkward drawings of a winged dragon like an advertisement for a correspondence course in art in a comic book.
“But we know the thing’s possible. What did that man Zwingler say they’d discovered at that Hospital in England? Some kind of chemical to enhance the intelligence—”
“He said they weren’t sure of that, sir.”
“Yes, but they said lasers were impossible a few years ago then they were in commercial production not long afterwards. The more we find out about the mind, the more likely it seems we can make it do tricks we never dreamed of. The Russians can make a person feel bravery or fear just by injecting a chemical into the brain. Any emotion they like. We can prevent senility to a certain extent. It’s no big deal to predict we’ll be able to make people think better in the near future—”
The President had a visionary—some would say, romantic—taste in scientific advisers. The current adviser’s rise to power took him out of an obscure professorship in social psychiatry at a Mid-Western university, through the Hudson Institute’s Committee on the Year 2000, to his present position, with a speed that alarmed some of his former colleagues. Not that he was a young man. On the contrary. He’d stayed a suspect maverick for too long, pursuing research into dubious topics such as genetic intelligence and conditioning techniques. However, the President had a firm faith in the possibility of managing people and events according to well-defined scripts drawn up by ‘responsible’ psychologists and sociologists. Or, as he put it in a State of the World message, of ‘orchestrating domestic and international events to make harmonious music’.
“Take that Russian who was smashed up in a car crash in Moscow. Bokharov. They reversed his death okay but they couldn’t do anything about the damage to his brain during the time he was dead. His value as a scientist was quartered. But look what we accomplished with that nuclear fusion man at Caltech—”
“Hammond?”
“Sure. His IQ rating was going off by a few fractions of a percentage point. Not enough to make any difference to the average guy. But in a top scientist like him, that’s the difference between excellent routine work—and what for want of a better word we’ve got to call genius. We managed to buck him up for those vital months till we caught up with the Russians—”
“That was using DNA extract?” a sharp-faced Italian-American—the Treasury Department’s head of drug intelligence—asked the Adviser, who nodded.
“Imagine if we could inject some drug that makes the difference of whole percentage points of intelligence at the peak of a man’s career. Give him the power to integrate everything he knows. We have to save the whole environment of these Indians—we need that drug, and at this stage that means the whole natural system it comes from.”
“It ain’t so awkward as it sounds,” said the CIA man, looking up from his dragons. “We can repair the dam afterwards—make it smaller. Then the area those Indians live in can be made into a sort of reserve—big enough so they don’t cotton on and act unnatural, like stop cultivating the drug…”
TWELVE
Charlie hummed, TO cheer himself, as he rode back through the rain from the other side of the dam.
How soon before he would be ‘Ridin’ home to Albuquerque’ like the song said.
He needed cheering. Images of the Nam haunted this landscape more and more these days.
The heat. The waiting. The sense of being trapped.
The café tarts stinking of ether. Girls who really knocked a man out I Anaesthetize was the name of the game…
Jorge was standing waiting at the end of the dam in the wet, waving the jeep down frantically…
“Charlie!” A cry of fear.
The noose round Charlie’s neck tightened a stage further.
“That Captain Paixao is here. With two prisoners. They’re questioning them in the store shed. A man and a woman.”
“Were they coming to—kill me?”
“You selfish sonofabitch! Paixao and his thugs are torturing them for information—a woman too!”
Charlie bit his lip.
“Shit… that’s bad. I guess we’d better—”
“What had we better? Put a stop to it? How do you do that—you tell me!”
“Shit, Jorge, I dunno. But one thing I’ll do right now is see what’s going on.”
Jorge climbed on board the jeep, clothes dripping wet from the rain.
Charlie revved the jeep towards the most distant of the tin sheds.
Graders and bulldozers were parked on the concrete there—and so was Paixao’s helicopter. The pilot sat smoking a cigarette, pointing an automatic rifle idly at the approaching jeep.
The door to the shed was guarded by another of Paixao’s men, with the face of a boxer dog and black bushy sideburns.
He shouted at the jeep as they pulled up.
“What’s he sayin’?”
“To piss off—it’s none of our business.”
“Say I insist on seeing Paixao.”
Jorge translated, then gave Charlie a despairing look.