“We thought perhaps you had gone to bed, colonel. Christine tells me you never enjoy yourself much at parties.”
“What do you want, darl?” Christine said irritably. “Pavel and I were discussing his fee for this afternoon.”
“If you two young things want to be alone,” Fortune said shortly, ‘go somewhere else. I’ve work to do in here.”
Efimov continued to smile but his eyes flicked briefly in the direction of Fortune’s desk. Fortune followed his glance. The top drawer was open, the key he had left upstairs in his uniform trousers protruding from the lock. Fortune inhaled headily, aware that Christine and he had finally arrived at crisis point.
“Come on, Pavel.” Christine pulled at Efimov’s sleeve. “I need another drink.”
“Not so fast,” Fortune snapped, spinning her round by the shoulder. “What were you doing at my desk?”
Christine stared coldly at him for a moment then her familiar features flowed into strangeness. “Take your hand away,” she screamed. “You want to be told? All right, I’ll tell you, you selfish, fat, useless … I was telling Pavel how you treat me and he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe how much of our money, my money, you’ve been paying to that horrible little Geissler. Who do you think you are, anyway? Having satellites tracked! Hiring computers! Why don’t you … ?”
Efimov drew her back a pace and stepped in front, looking at Fortune with contempt and a kind of satisfaction.
“You get out of here,” Fortune warned. “I refuse to fight for Christine. She isn’t property. But you’ve been in my desk, and that’s different.”
“You’d be foolish to descend to violence, colonel. Not after training for so long on chocolate bars.” Efimov dropped his long body into a professional-looking crouch and Fortune remembered he was a boxing instructor at the Hostel gymnasium.
Christine moved behind Efimov, heading for the door. Fortune lunged after her and saw Efimov throwing a fast, hooking left. He deliberately took the blow, smothering it in the great plaque of fat across his ribs, then he caught Efimov’s wrist with both hands and leaned back, swinging the other man like a hammer. Efimov’s feet pattered on the floor as he sped backwards into the wall. He was completely winded as he rebounded but Fortune punched him under the ribs anyway.
“What have you done?” Christine knelt beside the crumpled man.
Fortune got down and opened one of Efimov’s eyelids. He touched the eyeball and there was a violent fluttering reaction. “He’s all right,” Fortune said, wondering what happened next.
“Pavel wants me to marry him, you know. He wants me to go away with him,” Christine seemed to be talking to nobody but herself.
“Christine …’ Fortune began to speak, but the telephone on his desk rang fiercely. He picked up the handset and heard a male voice ask for him. He recognised the voice of his adjutant, Major Baillie.
“Fortune speaking,” he said flatly.
“Oh, hello sir,” Baillie replied with uncharacteristic excitement. “I thought you ought to know at the earliest possible moment. We’ve just had confirmation from UNO Northern Command. Nesster ship 1753 is definitely going to land in our sector.”
“Thanks for calling me, Brett. I’ll be right there.” Fortune set the phone down. He had been wondering what happened next. Now he knew.
The Unit swung over smoothly to a state of Red Alert, and Fortune found himself slipping instinctively into the lethal complexities of his job.
The preceding Yellow Alert had lasted three days, from the moment the Lunar radar bases had predicted that Nesster ship 1753 was going to touch down in one of the three north-west Atlantic sectors. As the great black cylinder spiralled in past the orbit of the Moon the variable factors, based on observation of all its precursors, were gradually eliminated until Northern Command knew exactly when and roughly where it would land. At that point, Sector N186—shown on ordinary maps as Iceland—was brought to full alert and preparations were made for the big kill, forty hours in the future.
Fortune’s command consisted of five hundred combatants, two hundred air and ground crew for the Unit’s fifteen vertical takeoff transports, and three hundred assorted technicians, clerks, storemen, cooks, batmen, drivers, etc. This meant that for every man who actually fought he had one in support, which was a pretty good ratio for a modern technical army. But, streamlined as the Unit’s organisation was, poising it for the hammer blow involved a great deal of work.
Fortune had been a long time on his feet when he drove back home along the road leading south to Hafnarfjordr. The early afternoon sun reached down across serried kingdoms of white cloud and sheep gleamed like pebbles scattered on the hillsides. It was a day on which Nessters simply could not be real—and yet, he reflected, on the afternoon of the following day approximately eight hundred of them would spill out of their ship right on this island. They would die, but it made them no less real. There was no alternative but to kill them, but it made the slaughter no less unpleasant. Fortune would not have to touch a single weapon, but his guilt was no less.
When he swung the big car into his drive Peter was kicking a bright pink ball in the garden, which meant Christine was still there. Fortune was relieved. He had not seen her since the debacle in his study the previous evening and half expected to find the house empty. Christine and he were not making out too well but he felt that the family unit was still important. Even the Nessters had family groups, and tried to preserve them when …
Fortune brought the heel of his hand down on the car’s horn lever, soaking himself in the blast of sound. Tomorrow was going to be bad, too bad to think about except when it was absolutely necessary, He went into the house, waving to Peter, and found Christine in the living room She was smoking a black cigarette and cleaning her typewriter with a toothbrush, brown eyes slitted with smoke and distaste.
“Peter threw his porage into it this morning,” she explained. “I don’t think he’ll ever get to like it.”
The normalcy felt good. Fortune wanted to dive into the day before yesterday and close it round him. “Did Bill Geissler call?”
“No. Was he supposed to?”
“In a way.”
“Well, he didn’t.”
Fortune stared out of the long window to where a lucky kick of Peter’s had sent the pink ball up high, spinning it lazily in the air like a soap bubble. “I’m sorry about last night….”
“Don’t apologise, please. I’ve forgotten it already.”
“Some of the papers in my desk …’
Christine raised her head and gave him a long, honest look of dislike. “I know about your desk, darling. Nobody is allowed to touch your desk.”
“People aren’t property, Christine,” he said hopelessly. “We can talk later. I’m too tired now. I’m going to bed for a few hours.” Fortune skimmed his braided cap viciously into a chair and stamped out of the room. Passing through the lobby he stopped abruptly, staring into his study at the telephone. Christine was left-handed; and it was one of his most triumphant little secrets that she never seemed to realise she set the handset down the opposite way to right-handed people. The phone was facing the wrong way now and, playing the hunch, he dialled Geissler’s number.
“For God’s sake, John, where have you been?” Geissler shouted. “Did you not get my message?”
Fortune swallowed hard. “You know what Christine’s like. She forgets things.”
“Like hell she does. Anyway, I’ve got news for you. It was suspect number four, the pure polar orbiting job. Mars has one in a perfectly corresponding orbit. They didn’t even have to check, the data was all on file up there.”