“You had a mutiny?”
The word was a dash of cold water. Counsel had handed him his head over using the term “mutiny.” “Wa-all, not exactly.” What were the weasel words they used? “What we had was more like a flaming outburst of zeal fueled by excess enthusiasm. This enthusiasm led Doctor Ramos and his people to—uh—to overstep their authority. We all going up there to restore the authority that rightfully belongs to the people of these United States.”
“By substituting Naval personnel for the American citizens which our government assigned to the UN? Didn’t the UN complain about this usurpation of authority?”
I think Ah may have blown it, Haye decided. Well, too frigging bad. “One question at a time, Mac. No, the UN did not complain. What-all we are doing is changing one set of people assigned to the UN for another set. Also assigned to the UN.”
“How come you didn’t tell anybody? The starship is a UN project, isn’t it?”
De la Haye nodded impassively. There hadn’t been time to tell anybody, but if you say that, the sonofabitch will want to know what the hurry was. “Why, yes, of course the starship is a UN project.”
“Right. Why didn’t you tell people you were going up?”
As Lady Macbeth said: “If t’were done, t’were best done quickly.” But I can’t tell him that. “Ah regret the failure of communications that seems to have taken place heah, Mister MacArthur.”
“Hmm. Yes,of course. Why are the other nations so exercised about all this?”
“I swear Ah don’t know, Mac. Maybe over at state they’ll be bettuh informed. What-all 1 read in the papers is that they seem afraid their civilians can’t work with ouah military, and that, of cou’se, is ridiculous.”
“Admiral Fontaine, why do you think the other nations are so exercised?”
“Look at what was done, sir,” was the cool reply. “We went and replaced the American civilians up there with American military. How did we do it? Secretly. Suddenly. Unilaterally. We are currently in de facto control of Luna Base, Lunar Station, Lunar Electric, and all of Lunar Three that we want.”
“But wasn’t the base mostly manned by Americans?”
“No, of course not. We paid about a third of the bills, we supplied about a third of the personnel—civilians, mostly, detailed to the UN.”
“Wasn’t the UN Command merely a fiction, admiral? A pretext to let the great powers do what they wanted in space?”
“Yes, yes, Mister MacArthur, the UN Command was a fiction. But it was a fiction agreed to by the great powers.” Fontaine sat forward and glared at the camera. “What happened to the UN command up there? We brushed it aside like it was nothing. Who gets upset? Not the UN, but the other great powers the UN was fronting for.”
“But what are they upset about?”
“The militarization of space. It looked like we were engaged in building a starship, to which we would commit the world’s arsenal of hydrogen bombs. After this, nobody is going to hand over their bombs no matter what we tell them.” Fontaine shook his head. “Not to the US military.”
The fat man looked pained. “But why not?”
“Good God, sir! We have just demonstrated that the US flat-out can’t be trusted, and you ask me why nobody will trust us?”
There was an inaudible remark offstage. “What’s that?” asked MacArthur, turning to the right.
The camera panned to the wings, showing Morton Levine holding a jaggedly torn fax. “We have a report that Turi John Ramos was murdered while in US custody,” he said, walking onto the sound stage. “Mister Secretary, do you have anything to say about this shocking abuse of military power?”
De la Haye blotted his perspiration-bespangled brow with a trembling hand. Running would be the end, an admission of guilt. But what to say? When in doubt blow smoke. “In the first place, if these very serious allegations should possibly prove true, Ah have heard nothing, nothing about any casualties on either side. In the second place, Ah expect that boy might have been depressed the way things were turning out, he being a such a flaming fanatic on the subject of starships, an’ if Turi John should, in fact, be dead, it might well have been bah his own hand. In the third place….”
The secretary of the Navy was saved by sheer, dumb luck. The career-destroying Turi John Ramos murder/suicide controversy vanished into thin air as the show’s producer walked onstage with a second fax message, which he handed to Morton Levine.
“The Russian squadron of the High Skies Fleet has gone into low polar orbit,” Morton read.Then he looked into the camera with wide, wide eyes, pancake makeup blotchy on his suddenly pale face. “If they are armed, they have taken up the classical attack posture!”
Diomedes Station watched the unfolding drama with all the detachment afforded by half a billion miles distance. The manner in which the drama was unfolded unto them was this: Earth routinely beamed twenty-six channels to Lunar Station; of those twenty-six channels, Diomedes could select any four, which were then relayed to Lunar Electric and beamed to Diomedes. Since it took ninety minutes for a channel change to take effect, channel browsing was rather less spontaneous than on Earth, or even Luna.
“Stupid summit meeting,” said Winslow, coming into the lounge. “What good will that do?”
“It might stop a few billion people from getting blown up,” replied Dr. Kerry. “Including, of course, the summiteers.You’re just in time to hear the commentators tell you what the official communique already told you.” They sat and watched, sifting through the redundancy and banality of the four TV channels available to them, like miners panning for gold.
“It looks like they got themselves off the hook,” said Winslow at last.
“Hook, indeed,” said Madeline Tosca. “What this reminds me of is professional wrestling. A lot of face making and screaming in agony as they follow the script.”
“What script? What do you think is happening?”
“Oh come on, Sioux, it is so obvious. Look at the deal they cut: Everybody leaves Luna Base and Lunar Three. Then the Russians explode their nukes—the ones carried by the Deep Space Fleet—in the vicinity of Lunar Three. On the far side of the starship, where the US can count them and verify their destruction, of course. Then everybody left on Lunar Station is evacuated. In the process the starship gets seriously trashed, and the Lunar complex will be well and truly gutted.”
“Gutted?” asked Winslow. “They said they were taking care to do no harm to the physical structure of the Lunar bases.”
“Right,” said Tosca. “At least, that’s what the lying sons of bitches went and told us. In the meantime, who benefits from all this play acting?”
“Well, a few billion people get a reprieve from nuclear annihilation,” Dr. Kerry replied. “That has to count for something.”
“Su-ure it does. And in the process the starship project gets knocked in the head.” Madeline Tosca looked mournful, like Medea about to kill her children. “So the boys in the military get to keep their atomic toys.”
“You think the whole thing was the military trying to keep their nuclear weapons?” asked Winslow.
“Well of course it was, dear man. Look at how the crisis started, how it developed.”