“He will, believe me. The crew who would rather die than accept our compromise is the man he’ll follow. And all of Implementation will follow him. He’s their leader.”
“And they’ve got all the weapons,” said Hood.
The Slowboat
XIIBleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.
Why Polly Tournquist?
She could have nothing to do with the present trouble. Since Saturday evening she had been suffering sensory deprivation in the coffin cure. Why must he be haunted by the colonist girl? What was her hold on him that she could pull him away from his office at a time like this? He hadn’t felt a fascination like this since…
He couldn’t remember.
The guard in front of him stopped suddenly, pushed a button in the wall, and stepped aside. Jesus Pietro jerked back to reality. They had reached the elevator.
The doors slid back, and Jesus Pietro stepped in, followed by the two guards.
(Where’s Polly? Deep in his mind something whispered, Where is she? Subliminally, he remembered. Tell me where Polly is!)
Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.
Either he’d finally lost his mind—and over a colonist girl!—or there was some connection between Matthew Keller and Polly Tournquist. But he had no evidence of that at all.
Perhaps the girl could tell him.
And if she could, certainly she would.
Matt had trailed them to the end of a blind corridor. When they stopped, Matt stopped too, confused. Was Castro going to Polly, or wasn’t he?
Doors slid back in the wall, and Matt’s three guides entered. Matt followed, but stopped at the doors. The room was too small. He’d bump an elbow and get shot—
The doors closed in his face. Matt heard muted mechanical noises, diminishing.
What in blazes was it, an airlock? And why here?
He was at the end of a dead-end corridor, lost in the Hospital. The Head and two guards were on the other side of those doors. Two guards, armed and alert—but they were the only guides he had. Matt pushed the big black button which had opened the doors.
This time they stayed closed.
He pushed it again. Nothing happened.
Was he doing exactly what the guard had done? Had the guard used a whistle, or a key?
Matt looked down the hall to where it bent, wondering if he could make his way back to Castro’s office. Probably not. He pushed the button again…
A muted mechanical noise, nearly inaudible, but rising.
Presently the doors opened to show a tiny, boxlike room, empty.
He stepped in, crouched slightly, ready for anything. There were no doors in the back. How had the others left? Nothing. Nothing but four buttons labeled One, Two, Door Open, Emergency Stop.
He pushed them in order. One did nothing. He pushed Two, and everything happened at once.
The doors closed.
The room started to move. He felt it, vibration and uncanny pressure against the soles of his feet. He dropped to his hands and knees, choking off a yell.
The pressure was gone, but still the room quivered with motion, and still there was the frightening, unfamiliar sound of machinery. Matt waited, crouching on all fours.
There was a sudden foreign feeling in his belly and gonads, a feel of falling. Matt said, “Wump!” and clutched at himself. The box jarred to a stop.
The doors opened. He came out slowly.
He was on a high narrow bridge. The moving box was at one end, supported in four vertical girders that dropped straight down into a square hole in the roof of the Hospital. At the other end of the bridge was a similar set of girders, empty.
Matt had never been this high outside a car. All of the Hospital was below him, lit by glare lights: the sprawling amorphous structure of rooms and corridors, the inner grounds, the slanting wall, the defense perimeter, the trapped forest, and the access road. And rising up before him was the vast black hull of the Planck.
Matt’s end of the bridge was just outside what was obviously the outer hull of the ancient slowboat. The bridge crossed the chisel-sharp ring of the leading edge, so that its other end was over the attic.
The Planck. Matt looked down along the smooth black metal flank of the outer hull. For most of its length the ship was cylindrical; but the tail, the trailing edge, flared outward for a little distance, and the leading edge was beveled like a chisel, curving in at a thirty-degree angle to close the twenty-foot gap between outer and inner hulls, the gap that held the guts of the ship. More than halfway down, just below a ring of narrow windows, the roof of the Hospital moved in to grip the hull.
Something hummed behind him. The moving box was on its way down.
Matt watched it go, and then he started across the bridge, sliding his hands along the hip-high handrails. The dropping of the box might mean that someone would be coming up.
At the other end he looked for a black button in one of the four supporting girders. It was there, and he pushed it. Then he looked down.
The attic, the space enclosed by the inner hull, was as perfectly cylindrical as a soup can with both ends removed. Four airfoils formed a cross at the stem, a few yards above the ground, and where they crossed was a bulky, pointed casing. There was a ring of four windows halfway down the inner hull. The airlock was at the same level. Matt could see it by looking between the hull and the moving box, which was rising toward him.
Matt felt a chill as he looked down at that pointed casing between the fins. The ship’s center of mass was directly over it. Therefore it had to be the fusion drive.
The Planck was rumored to be a dangerous place, and not without reason. A ship that had carried men between the stars, a ship three hundred years old, was bound to inspire awe. But there was real power here. The Planck’s landing motors should still be strong enough to hurl her into the sky. Her fusion drive supplied electrical power to all the colonist regions: to teedee stations, homes, smokeless factories—and if that fusion plant ever blew, it would blow Alpha Plateau into the void.
Somewhere in the lifesystem, sandwiched between inner and outer hull, were the controls that could blow the bomb in that casing. The Head was in there too—somewhere.
If Matt could bring them together…
The moving box reached the top, and Matt entered.
It dropped a long way. The Planck was tall. Even the beveled ring of the leading edge, which had held stored equipment for the founding of a colony, was forty feet high. The ship was one hundred and eighty feet high, including a landing skirt, for the inner hull did not quite reach the ground. The stem and the mouths of the landing motors were supported ten feet above the ground by that long skirtlike extension of the outer hull.
This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he’d have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock.
The airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-and-control panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and unnerving to wonder what all those dials were trying to tell him.
Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar…ah. A ladder. A ladder running uselessly from door to wall across the ceiling of the airlock.
Sure. With the ship spinning in space, the outer door would be a trapdoor down from the attic. Of course you’d need a ladder. Matt grinned and strode through the airlock and nearly ran face on into a policeman.
“The luck of Matt Keller” had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heard a patter of mercy-bullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the corner, firing.
Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. “Stop! It’s me!”
The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn’t fire yet…and he didn’t fire yet…and pres
ently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered whom he’d been taken for. It wouldn’t matter; the man had already forgotten him.
Matt chose to follow him instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men approach, and ignored one and recognized the other, he wouldn’t shoot—no matter how trigger-happy he was.
The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left. Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights; the wall on the right was black, with a roughened rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors in the floor were closed and covered with walkways. Most of the ceiling doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colony-built, and all were riveted into place.
It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity.
Matt heard sounds and voices from some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn’t see what was happening above him, and he didn’t try. He was listening for Castro’s voice.
If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controls—wherever they were—then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under threat of physical pain, but how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau?
And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner.
…That was Castro’s voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it and tried the handle. Locked.
Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him.
No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn’t stay here forever.
If only Laney were here now.
A voice. Polly jerked to attention—except that she felt no jerk; she did not know if she had moved or not.
A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she’d wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn’t concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends’ faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharp-edged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly; his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy moustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred, she had reached to bring him back, he had blurred more…
A voice. It had her complete attention.
“Polly,” it said, “you must trust me.”
She wanted to answer, to express her gratitude, to tell the voice to keep talking, to beg it to let her out. She was voiceless.
“I would like to free you, to bring you back to the world of sense and touch and smell,” said the voice. Gently, sympathetically, regretfully, it added, “I cannot do that just yet. There are people making me keep you here.”
A voice had become the voice, familiar, wholly reassuring. Suddenly she placed it.
“Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood. They won’t let me free you”—Castro’s voice. She wanted to scream—“because you failed in your mission. You were to find out about ramrobot number one-forty-three. You failed.”
Liar! Liar! I didn’t fail! She wanted to scream out the truth, all of the truth. At the same time she knew that that was Castro’s aim. But she hadn’t talked in so long!
“Are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps I can persuade Harry and Jayhawk to let me free your mouth. Would you like that?”
I’d love that, Polly thought. I’d tell all the secrets of your ancestry. Something within her was still rational. The sleep, that was what had done it. How long had she been here? Not years, not even days; she would have been thirsty. Unless they’d given her water intravenously. But however long it had been, she’d slept for some part of the time. Castro didn’t know about the mercy-bullets. He’d come hours early.
Where was the voice?
All was silent. Faintly she could hear her pulse beating in her carotid arteries; but as she grasped for the sound, it too was gone.
Where was Castro? Leaving her to rot?
Speak!
Speak to me!
The Planck was big, but its lifesystem occupied less than a third of its volume: three rings of pressurized compartments between the cargo holds above and the water fuel tanks and fission-driven landing motors below. Much cargo had been needed to set up a self-sufficient colony. Much fuel had been needed to land the Planck: trying to land on the controlled hydrogen bomb of the fusion drive would have been like landing a blowtorch on a featherbed.
So the lifesystem was not large. But neither was it cramped, since the compartments aft of the corridor had been designed for the comfort of just three growing families.
That which was now Jesus Pietro’s interrogation room had once been a living room, with sofas, a cardtable, a coffeetable, a reader screen connected to the ship’s library, a small refrigerator. The tables and other things were gone now, cut from the outer wall with torches long ago. It had been a big room, luxuriously so for a spacecraft, where room is always at a premium. It had had to be big. Any normal apartment-dweller can step outside for a breath of air.
Now, upended, the room was merely tall. Halfway up the walls were the doors which had led to other parts of the apartment. The door to the corridor had become a trapdoor, and the door just under it, a closet to hold spacesuits in case of emergency, could now be reached only from the ladder. In the crescent of floor space at the bottom of the room were a long, heavy box, two guards in chairs, an empty chair, and Jesus Pietro Castro, closing the padded lip of the speaking tube at one corner of the box.
“Give her ten minutes to think it over,” he said. He glanced at his watch, noted the time.
His handphone buzzed.
“I’m in the vivarium,” Major Jansen reported. “The girl’s a colonist, all right, in stolen crew clothing. We don’t’ know where she got it yet. I doubt we’ll like the answer. We had to pump antidotes into her; she was dying from an overdose of mercy-weapons.”
“No sign that anyone came with her?”
“I didn’t say that, sir. There are two things. One, the wires were pulled on the chair she was sitting in. Her helmet was stone dead. She couldn’t have done that herself. Maybe that’s why one of the prisoners woke up this afternoon.”
“And then he freed the others? I don’t believe it. We would have noticed the pulled wires afterward.”
“I agree, sir. So somebody pulled those wires after she was in the chair.”
“Maybe. What’s your second point?”
“When the gas went off in the vivarium, one of the four police wasn’t wearing his nose plug. We haven’t been able to find it anywhere; his locker’s empty, and when I called his wife, she said he took it with him. He’s awake now, but he has no idea—”
“Is it worth bothering with? The guards aren’t used to gas filters. Or gas.”
“There was a mark on the man’s forehead, sir. Like the one we found this afternoon, only this one is in ballpoint ink.”
“Oh.”
“Which means that there must be a traitor in Implementation itself, sir.”
“What makes you think so, Major?”
“The bleeding-heart symbol does not represent any known revolutionary organization. Further, only a guard could have made that mark. Nobody else has entered the vivarium tonight.”
Jesus Pietro swallowed his impatience. “You may be right, Major. Tomorrow we?
??ll devise ways to smoke them out.”
Major Jansen made several suggestions. Jesus Pietro listened, made appropriate comments, and cut him off as soon as he could.
A traitor in Implementation? Jesus Pietro hated to think so. It was possible, and not a thing to be ignored; but the knowledge that the Head suspected such a thing could damage Implementation morale more than any possible traitor.
In any case, Jesus Pietro was not interested. No traitorous guard could have moved invisibly in Jesus Pietro’s office. The bleeding heart was something else entirely.
Jesus Pietro called the power room. “You aren’t doing anything right now, are you? Good. Would one of you bring us some coffee.”
Three minutes more and he could resume interrogation.
Jesus Pietro paced. He walked off balance, with one arm bound immobile against his body: one more annoyance. The numbness was wearing off in his mangled hand.
Yes, the bleeding heart was something else again. A gruesome symbol on a vivarium floor. Fingers that broke without their owner noticing. An ink drawing appearing from nowhere on a dossier cover, like a signature. A signature.
Intuition was tricky. Intuition had told Jesus Pietro that something would happen tonight. And something had; but what? Intuition, or something like it, had brought him here. Surely he’d had no logical reason to keep thinking about Polly Tournquist. Did she really know something? Or did his subconscious mind have other motives for bringing him here?
Jesus Pietro paced, following the arc of the inner wall.
Presently someone knocked on the door overhead. The guards loosened their guns and looked up. Fumbling sounds, and then the door dropped open and a man backed slowly down the ladder. He balanced a tray in one hand. He did not try to close the door after him.
The slowboat had never been a convenient place to work. Ladders everywhere. The man with the tray had to back a long way down—the full length of what had been a large, comfortable living room—before he touched bottom.
Matt poked his head through the doorway, upside down.
There was the lab man, backing down the ladder with his coffee tray balanced on one hand. On the floor were three more men, and one was Castro. As Matt’s head appeared in the doorway each pair of eyes glanced up, held Matt’s stare for a moment, then dropped.