But the pilot was Spence! I had found it troubling to think of killing Sam, but it was Spence inside that OTV! No matter how angry I was with him, no matter how much I told myself I hated him, I could not knowingly, willingly, send him to his death.
“For what it’s worth,” Spence reported cheerfully, “the radiation monitors in this ol’ tin can show everything’s in the green. Radiation’s building up outside, but the shielding’s protecting me just fine. So far.”
I turned from the display screen to Ric. His face looked awful.
“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t kill him.”
He reached out his hand toward my keyboard, then let it drop to his side. “Neither can I.”
“OIB in three minutes,” Spence’s voice called out. “You copy?”
I looked at the mission timeline clock as I flicked the radio switch again. “We copy OIB in two minutes, fifty-six seconds.”
Ric sank down onto the chair next to me, his head drooping. “Some revolutionary,” he muttered.
“Let me warn my father,” I pleaded. “You don’t want his blood on your hands.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “I can’t go that far.”
“But Sam will be with him, don’t you understand?”
“Sam? Why would—”
“Sam went to New York! That’s what Spence told us. The only reason for Sam to go to New York is to see my father. Sam will be in the line of fire when your assassins strike. They’ll kill him too!”
Ric looked miserable, but he said in a hoarse croak, “That can’t be helped. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Well, I can,” I said, reaching for the telephone.
“Don’t!”
“What will you do? Kill me?”
He grabbed my arm. I tried to pull free but he was stronger. I struggled but he held me in his powerful arms and pulled me to him and kissed me. Before I realized what I was doing I was kissing him, wildly, passionately, with all the heat of a jungle beast.
At last Ric pulled loose. He stared into my eyes for a long, timeless moment, then said, “Yes. Call your father. Warn him. I can’t be a party to murder. It’s one thing to talk about it, plan for it. But I just can’t go through with it.”
“OIB in one minute,” Spence’s voice chirped.
“Copy OIB in fifty-nine seconds,” I said as I took up the telephone. My eyes were still on Ric. He smiled at me, the sad smile of a man who has given up everything. For me.
“You are not a killer,” I said to him. “That is nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But the revolution—”
“To hell with the revolution and all politics!” I snapped as I tapped out the number for my father’s hotel room.
“We are sorry,” said a computer-synthesized voice, “but the number you have called is not in service at this time.”
Cold terror gripped my heart.
I called the hotel’s main number. It was busy. For half an hour, while Spence’s OTV settled into its equatorial orbit and he read off all the radiation monitors inside and outside the spacecraft, the hotel’s main switchboard gave nothing but a busy signal.
I was ready to scream when Ric suddenly bolted from the control center and came back a moment later with a hand-sized portable TV. He turned it to the all-news channel.
“… hostage situation,” said a trench-coated reporter standing in front of a soaring hotel tower. It was drizzling in New York but a huge throng had already gathered out on the streets.
“Is the president of Venezuela still in there?” asked an unseen anchor woman.
“It’s the president of Ecuador, Maureen,” said the reporter on the street. “And, yes, as far as we know he’s still in his suite with the gunmen who broke in about an hour ago.”
“Do you know who’s in there with him?”
The reporter, bareheaded in the chilly drizzle, squinted into the camera. “A couple of members of his staff. The gunmen let all the women in the suite go free about half an hour ago. And there is apparently an American businessman in there, too. The hotel security director has identified the American as a Sam Gunn, from Orlando, Florida.”
“How could the rebels get past my father’s security guards?” I wondered out loud.
“Bribes,” said Ric. He spoke the word as if it were a loathsome thing. “Some men will sell their souls for money.”
I told Spence what was happening, of course. He seemed strangely nonchalant.
“Sam’s been in fixes like this before. He always talks his way out of ’em.”
He was trying to keep my spirits up, I thought. “But these men are killers!” I said. “Assassins.”
“If they haven’t shot anybody yet, the chances are they won’t. Unless the New York cops get trigger-happy.”
That was not very encouraging.
“For what it’s worth,” Spence added, “the radiation monitors inside my cabin are still in the green.”
We had not had time to link the radiation monitors to the telemetry system, so there was no readout for them on my console.
“Maybe you could pipe the television news up to me,” he suggested. “I’ve got nothing else to do for a stretch.”
I did that. We watched the tiny television screen until Gene Redding and his assistants showed up at eight AM A murky morning was breaking through the clouds in New York. I thought about hiring a jet plane to fly up there, but realized it would do no good. The hostage crisis dragged on, with the hotel surrounded by police and no one entering or leaving the penthouse suite of my father.
All the employees of VCI were watching the TV scene by now. It seemed as if at least half of them were jammed into the mission control center. Gene Redding had taken over as controller; I had moved to the right-hand chair, a headset still clamped over my ear.
“Want to make a bet Sam talks them out of whatever they came for?” Spence asked me.
I shook my head, then realized that he could not see me. “No,” I said. “Not even Sam could—”
“Wait a minute!” said the news reporter. Like the rest of us, he had been on the scene all night without relief. “Wait a minute! There seems to be some action up there!”
The camera zoomed up to the rooftop balcony of my father’s suite. And there stood Sam, grinning from ear to ear, and my father next to him, also smiling—although he looked drawn and pale, tired to the point of exhaustion. Behind them, three of the rebel gunmen were pulling off their ski masks. They too were laughing.
I rented the fastest jet available at the Orlando airport and flew to New York. With Ric at my side.
By the time we reached my father’s hotel suite the police and the crowds and even the news reporters had long since gone. Sam was perched on the edge of one of the big plush chairs in the sitting room, looking almost like a child playing in a grown-up’s chair. He was still wearing the faded coveralls that he had put on for the space mission.
My father, elegantly relaxed in a silk maroon dressing gown and white silk ascot, lounged at his ease in the huge sofa placed at a right angle to Sam’s chair. The coffee table before them was awash with papers.
My father was smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder. He was just blowing a cloud of gray smoke up toward the ceiling when Ric and I burst into the room.
“Papa!” I cried.
He leaped to his feet and put the cigarette behind him like a guilty little boy. Sam laughed.
“Papa, are you all right?” I rushed across the room to him. Awkwardly, he balanced the long cigarette holder on the arm of the sofa as I flung my arms around his neck.
“I am unharmed,” he announced calmly. “The rebels have gone back to Quito to form the new government.”