Yes. Yes. Lentrall finished off the last of the soup in a single swallow, and got to his feet. The blanket still wrapped around his body, he made his way to his home office, in the far corner of the ground floor. Yes. Comet Grieg. That was what they would remember, not this afternoon’s foolish humiliation.
And the best way to wipe the memory of today’s disaster from his mind would be to get back to work, immediately, on the Comet Grieg project. Kaelor had been quite right to point out there were a large number of unresolved problems to deal with. No time like the present to deal with them. He could call up the appropriate computer files from here and set to work on them.
It, of course, never so much as crossed Davlo’s mind to consider where, precisely, the computer files actually were. It had never so much as dawned on him that they had an actually physical location, a position in space that held them. They were simply there, in the massively interlinked comm and computer system that interlinked all the comm terminals in the city and all the planet’s outposts of civilization. He could call them up from any place, any time, and set to work on them, whenever he liked.
He had never given the matter much consideration, any more than he would have stopped to remember that the air was there for him to breathe whenever he wanted, or that his household robots knew when to serve him soup.
Lentrall sat down at his home office comm station and activated his files on Comet Grieg. At least he tried to do so.
Because, quite suddenly, it was as if the air wasn’t there for him to breathe anymore.
THE FLIGHT OVER the Great Bay had been smooth as silk, the aircar leaving the storm behind with the coastline. That was not too surprising. The climate people had told Kresh that it was a typical pattern: warm, moist air dumping its moisture the moment it came in contact with the cool, dry air over land. Part of it had to do with the air being forced up by the mountain ranges just inland from the city of Hades. The wind blew the air up the side of the hill, and the higher the air went, the more its barometric pressure dropped and the less moisture it could hold. So the water came out of the air, and it rained. A rain shadow effect, they called it.
But if it could work on the mainland, it could work just as handily on the windward side of an island. Especially a nice, big island like Purgatory. The prevailing winds over the island were from the south. Oberon flew Kresh’s aircar in from the northwest, up and over the central peak of the island—and then right back down into weather every bit as heavy as what they had left behind at Hades.
The aircar dropped down into the clouds, and was instantly engulfed by the raging storm. Kresh grabbed at his armrests again as the aircar bucked and heaved and bounced allover the sky, thunder booming all around as lightning lit up the storm-tossed skies outside his viewport. Suddenly Kresh was caught in the urge to get forward, to get to the cockpit and see what was going on, to grasp hold of the controls and take over. But if that was not panic talking, it was the next best thing.
Kresh forced himself to relax, to ease back. It was going to be all right. Oberon was a good pilot. He looked out the viewport, and down at the rain, far below. He could not help but think back to another storm on Purgatory, five years before. A storm brought on by the weatherfields, the huge forcefields generated at the Terraforming Center. A storm that had raged that night when Chanto Grieg was murdered. At least tonight, in this storm, there was no disaster waiting to strike. Kresh smiled to himself. Talk about misplaced confidence. How the devil could he know what schedules were kept by disasters? They tended to come up whenever they pleased, without bothering to consult the likes of Alvar Kresh.
There was a harder bump than any before, and suddenly the aircar had stopped moving. Startled, Kresh blinked and looked out the viewport. It took him a moment to realize they were on the ground.
The door to the aircar’s cockpit opened and Oberon stepped into the main cabin. “We have arrived, sir,” he said in his low, almost gravelly, voice. “As you can see, sir, the weather is extremely inclement. As there is no covered access between the landing pad and the entrance, perhaps you might wish to wait until the weather has cleared before you set out.”
Kresh peered through the viewport, using his hand to block the glare from the cabin’s interior lights. He spotted the entrance to the Terraforming Center. “It can’t be more than a hundred meters or so to the door,” Kresh said. “Why the devil should I wait?”
“As you see fit, sir. If you think it a wise idea to go immediately.”
Damned busybody nursemaid of a robot. Kresh indulged himself with a brief flash of temper. If he waited around until the weather was just right, would Oberon then hint that he should wait until he had had a full meal and a nice long nap before setting out on the arduous thirty-second journey across the parking lot? They were on the clock here, and he had already been worrying that he had wasted too much time.
“I think it’s a wise idea, all right,” Kresh growled. “In fact I find it downright brilliant.” He undid his seat restraint, got up, and grabbed his rain poncho from the seat opposite, where he had tossed it down after coming aboard. The thing was still a trifle damp, but no matter. He pulled it on over himself, adjusted the hood, and glared at Oberon. “I’d suggest you stay here for the time being,” he said, “unless you think it a wise idea to get in my way.”
Plainly, Oberon did not think it a wise idea to reply to that. Kresh turned his back on the robot, grabbed the hatch handle, and yanked up on it. The hatch unlatched, and Kresh gave it a good hard shove. It swung open and he stepped out into the roaring weather.
The driving rain caught him full in the face, coming down cold and hard. Kresh held up his hand to shield his face, and squinted through the downpour. He walked around to the opposite side of the ship, and then straight ahead, toward the entrance to the Terraforming Center. The wind grabbed at his poncho, blowing it flat against his body and sending its hem flapping and slapping wildly behind him. He leaned into the wind, struggling to hold the poncho hood on top of his head as the wind did its best to pull it off, and the rain blew in regardless.
A pair of big double glass doors, the sort that opened at the center, formed the main entrance of the Terraforming Center. Kresh got to them and almost grabbed at the handles before he realized that wouldn’t work. He wasn’t going to get in unless he followed the rules—rules he had approved himself. “VOICEPRINT!” he shouted above the noise of the storm.
“Auto-voiceprint system ready,” an utterly depersonalized voice replied from nowhere in particular. Even though Kresh had been expecting a reply, it still startled him. The voice was clearly artificial—calm, emotionless, bloodless.
Kresh answered back in a somewhat lower tone of voice. If he could hear the voiceprint, probably it could hear him. “Name—Governor Alvar Kresh,” he said. “Password—Terra Grande.”
“Identity confirmed, clearance to enter confirmed,” the voice replied. The doors unlatched. Kresh, impatient and eager to get out of the rain, grabbed the handles of both doors and pulled them a bit too hard. The wind caught at the left side door and yanked it out of his hand, bouncing it against the left-side wall before it swung back. There was a second, inner pair of doors that swung inward, and Kresh shoved them out of his way without breaking stride.