For fear that his identity and rôle in saving Sugaiguntung might have become widely known, he insisted on being sent up to his room by a back route avoiding the main lobby. They found a baggage elevator and no one saw him except an incurious porter. Having got rid of his escort, he made sure that the door between his room and Bronwen’s was bolted on his side, and opened his communikit.
One of its circuits could be adjusted to detect bugging devices. He found one sunk in the wooden surround of the closet. Not caring about subtlety, he played the flame of his pocket lighter on it for a minute or so. A cautious reporter, he reasoned, would be expected to want to keep his exclusive stories to himself. There was also a tap on the phone, but that he didn’t worry about; it was inactive except when the instrument was in use.
Effortfully, he composed two messages, one in writing, to be read over the phone, the other whispered into the hidden device which would impose it, scrambled, as a parasite modulation on the phone signal. The former badly recounted that a mucker had attacked Sugaiguntung and he had dealt with him. The latter said that if anybody cared the scientist was riper than a plum and ought to be picked.
He put in for a call to the nearest available relay satellite and was told he would have to wait. He waited. Eventually the connection was made and he sent the double message. While he was thus occupied he heard Bronwen’s door open and shut and the door between the rooms was tried, very gently.
The job done, he shut off the phone and put the communikit away. They had fed him at the hospital before letting him go; he wasn’t hungry. He thought about a drink or a joint, and lacked the enthusiasm. He undressed and climbed into bed.
Lying in the dark, ambushing him, was a young man with his throat bleeding a river.
In a short while he got up. There was a rim of light around the door to Bronwen’s room. He unbolted it and pushed it open. She was sitting on the bed, naked, in the full lotus posture, as composed as if she had been waiting for him.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I was very rude to you earlier.” She began to unfold her limbs like a flower opening its petals to the sun. “You must have sensed that you were needed.”
Donald shook his head blankly. By now she was off the bed and approaching him with a slight sway of her hips.
“Is it true what I’ve been told—that you saved Dr. Sugaiguntung from a mucker?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“You sensed that you were needed for that, didn’t you? It was why you left me all of a sudden. You have the power we call”—he didn’t catch the word, which was long and assonantal, more likely to be Sanskrit than modern Hindi.
“No,” Donald said. Standing unclothed in the middle of the floor, he began to shake. He had thought it very hot tonight, but he was chilled to his marrow, shivering and shivering. “No,” he said again. “The only power I have is the power to kill, and I don’t want it. It makes me terribly afraid.” His teeth came together after the last word and started to chatter.
“It is always like this when you are used as the channel for a divine force,” Bronwen said, as though she had spent her entire life studying the question. “It overloads the body and mind. But you are lucky. It could have burned you out.”
Not burned, frozen. Wouldn’t it have been better if the mucker had killed Sugaiguntung, perhaps me too? What am I going to make him do?
But that had passed out of his control.
Bronwen was reaching up with professional detachment to place her palm on the crown of his head. After that she touched him lightly on the forehead, throat, heart, navel, pubis and coccyx: the seven chakras. She said, “The force has gone from your belly to your head. You are thinking of things that never happened. Let me draw it back.”
She dropped gracefully on one knee and addressed his body with her mouth.
* * *
Eventually the phone’s buzz, which at first he did not recognise, it being shriller and shorter than its counterpart at home, dug him from the sleep into which Bronwen’s violent love-making had driven him. He clambered out of bed and stumbled into his own room, hand groping for the switch.
Muzzy, he looked at the instrument blurred in darkness and waited for the screen to light. It was long moments before he realised there was none, and he should have said something to indicate the connection had been made.
“Uh—Hogan,” he muttered.
“Delahanty!” an excited voice exclaimed. “Congratulations, Hogan! Engrelay Satelserv never expected anything like this big a story!”
“Christ, was that all you wanted to say? It’s two-thirty anti-matter here.”
“Yes, I realise that. Sorry. But I thought you deserved to be told at once how delighted we are. Of course, what you filed will require some editing, but…”
He paused. Donald waited passively for him to finish.
“You got that? I said it’ll require editing!”
Oh. Donald made a long arm and picked up his communikit, setting it alongside the phone. There would be a message coming through blipped and scrambled, which the machine would play back afterwards in comprehensible English. But things like the code phrases he had been taught seemed childish and irrelevant in the wake of the mucker’s death.
“I catch,” he said. “Sorry. I’m exhausted.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Delahanty said. “Taking on a mucker—it’s incredible! And of course it was a complete beat for us because the day’s official releases haven’t included it. Gone to top level for a decision, probably. All we had was a third-hand rumour before your story hit. We’re playing it for all it’s worth—and you will be too, naturally.”
“I asked for a private interview,” Donald said absently.
“Excellent! Make sure you get film, too—our regular stringer will set that up for you, I’m certain.” He wandered off into a welter of fulsome praise until eventually he cut the circuit.
Relieved, Donald altered the controls of the communikit and listened to the clear-language version it had automatically deciphered from the incoming signal.
Delahanty’s voice, reduced to bare recognisability by the frequency-chopping effect of the blip process, said, “Hogan, I took it straight to Washington to be computed and the verdict is that he must be got out as fast as possible. There’s never been a whisper of disaffection concerning him before, and he might change his mind.
“Get him to Jogajong’s camp. We run a submarine courier service up the Shongao Strait—that’s the way we got Jogajong himself in and out. Aquabandit activity is maximal at the moment, but it’ll drop back in a few days.
“We’re relying on you. There’ll be medals in it if you fancy them. Good luck—and by the way! If you can handle a mucker, the experts say, you can handle anything.”
The thin whisper died away. Donald sat in the darkness staring at nothing, thinking about Sugaiguntung and maybe having to kidnap him and getting him across the Strait to the jungle cove where Jogajong was lying low under the very noses of those who most dearly wanted to put him to death, then escaping by submarine with Chinese hunter-killers in pursuit …
I want out. I want out. I want OUT!
A hand touched him on the shoulder. He jumped and whirled and it was only Bronwen come to see what had become of him. She moved so silently he had not heard her approach.
“It was my head office,” Donald said. “Pleased with what I’ve done.”
The words tasted filthy on his tongue.
context (23)
TO BE AVOIDED
Transcript—SECRET—for secure file
Dr. Corning (at State)
We have Scramble A on, don’t we? Good, yes, we do. Dick, sorry to bother you.
Mr. Richard Ruze (Engrelay)
No trouble, Raphael. What can we do for you that we aren’t doing already?
Dr. Corning
Yes, we are asking a lot of you just now, aren’t we? I have to ask something else, though, I’m afraid. You’re carrying this tremendous story filed b
y the man you sent to Gongilung, Donald Hogan—
Mr. Ruze
Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? We’re extremely grateful to you for giving him to us—we didn’t expect to get anything out of him, let alone a sensaysh like this.
Dr. Corning
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite follow that. It unscrambled as something about giving him to you and I think it must—
Mr. Ruze
You mean you don’t know about that?
Dr. Corning
(inaudible)
Mr. Ruze
He’s one of your own people. We’re giving him his cover for the trip—hired him as a special correspondent. That was what I thought you had in mind when you said we were doing a lot for you at—
Dr. Corning
No, Dick, I was thinking of something else entirely. A matter I guess is uppermost in my mind. Well, look, this means you’re going to feel I’m applying leverage, but—
Mr. Ruze
Lever away, Raphael. We show a sheeting great profit on the Hogan scene so far and we can afford to be generous.
Dr. Corning
I’ll go straight to the point, then. You know we run trend-studies on all the big media. Our computers say you’re liable to involve Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere in the Yatakangi scene soon. (Pause of 8 sec.) All right, you didn’t say yes, but we were right last time and the time before.
Mr. Ruze
You want it not. Tell me why?
Dr. Corning
Yatakang means one thing to the audience right now, and we’re taking that subject straight and slow.
Mr. Ruze
I have Shalmaneser time booked for SCANALYZER as usual in an hour or so. I put in a Yatakangi programme for evaluation.
Dr. Corning
Think he’ll tell me the details? I’d like a sight of that, if you don’t mind, to see if it agrees our own study.
Mr. Ruze
Which said …
Dr. Corning
Gave them a sixty-forty chance of bringing it off when we first checked. We programmed in some new material about Yatakangi human resources and dragged it down to fifty-fifty. Since then we’ve been re-evaluating every forty-eight hours and currently it’s seventy-three to twenty seven against. (Pause of 11 sec.)
Mr. Ruze
I see. You think it might raise false hopes.
Dr. Corning
The impact of Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere would give the claim sort of automatic cachet. It would save you possible later embarrassment and us a lot of definite problems if you—
Mr. Ruze
I read you. Guess we can send them back to MAMP … By the way, Raphael, when you asked us to lay that on heavy you hinted there was a big breakthrough due shortly. It’s a long time and no roughage.
Dr. Corning
On that, we have eighty-two to eighteen in favour. When it breaks ninety the whole story will bust loose.
Mr. Ruze
It’d better be worth the wait.
Dr. Corning
I so testify. Well, thanks very much, Dick—glad you saw what I set course for.
Mr. Ruze
Don’t I always? I’ll call you the results from Shal when I have them. ’Bye.
Dr. Corning
’Bye.
continuity (30)
TURN HER ON AND LET HER ROLL
At the head of his cabinet table, in the rather mean and ill-maintained Parliament building, President Obomi struggled to focus his surviving eye on those who had joined him. There was a small patch where vision blurred into meaningless dots and swirls; the doctors said something about a retinal trauma and talked of optic nerve regrafting and regretted that it would take a month to heal if they did operate. There might, now, be a month to spare. He hoped so.
Immediately to his left were Ram Ibusa and Leon Elai; beyond them, Kitty Gbe sat next to Gideon Horsfall. Facing the president from the foot of the table was Elihu Masters. And on the other side were the representatives from GT led by Norman House.
“Well?” said the president at length.
Norman licked his lips and pushed across the shiny top of the table a thick pile of green printouts from Shalmaneser.
“It’ll work,” he said, and wondered what he would have done if he had not been able to utter that simple phrase.
“Have you any reservations, Norman?” Elihu inquired.
“I—no. None. I don’t believe anyone else has.”
Terence, Worthy, Consuela, all shook their heads. Their faces had a uniformly dazed expression, as though they found it impossible to accept the evidence of their own judgment.
“So we think it will work,” the president said. “Ought it to be done? Leon?”
Dr. Leon Elai also clutched a thick file of Shalmaneser printouts. He said, “Zad, I’ve never had material like this to work with before. I’ve barely had time to read it, there’s so much! But I’ve extracted a kind of digest, and…”
“Let me hear it, please.”
“Well, first there are the problems with our neighbours.” Dr. Elai extracted a handwritten white sheet from among the stack of green. “The probabilities are high that for about two years there will be accusations against us for submitting to neo-colonialism. By that time the economic pressure to cooperate in the subsidiary aspects of the project such as placing contracts for manufactures which will by then show signs of being cheaper here than anywhere else on the continent will tend to reduce their violence. Also there will be a chance for them to buy cheap power from us. Within a decade at most, it says, they will become reconciled to the idea.
“Chinese and Egyptian interference is likely to be worse and go on longer. However, we can count on South African support, Kenyan, Tanzanian—shall I read the list?”
“Tell us how it comes out on balance.”
“There appears to be no chance of outside intervention halting the project unless some country is prepared to launch a major missile attack on us. And the probability of United Nations retaliation for such a crime is ninety-one per cent.” A trace of awe coloured Elai’s voice, as though he had never expected to be talking of the foreign affairs interests of his country in such terms.
“Very well. We may expect to be safe from other people’s jealousy, then.” Obomi’s eye switched to Ram Ibusa. “Ram, I have worried about the impact of so much money on our precarious economy. Are we going to suffer from inflation, unjust distribution of income, a top-heavy tax-structure?”
Ibusa gave an emphatic headshake. “Until I saw what this computer Shalmaneser can tell us, I was afraid of that too. But I do now believe we can cope with all those problems, provided we can continue to rely on General Technics’ assistance in processing the information. What it comes down to is that we have here the first-ever chance in history to control a country’s economy directly. There will not be any taxes in the traditional sense!”
He leafed through his own set of Shalmaneser printouts.
“There will first be the loan in which the American government will take its fifty-one per cent share. From it we will make a series of loans of our own, some of which will be into investment funds the interest on which will pay for the following: a subsistence ration of food, an issue of clothing to all working people and children of school age, and medical care of an improved standard. There will also be a building allowance to heads of families which will by law have to be spent on domestic improvements such as house-repairs.
“But the cost of the project will at once be of the order of three times our present GNP. Simply by controlling what the computer says we shall be controlling directly a higher proportion of the money circulating in the country than is possible anywhere in the world.
“At the worst possible reading of the factors concerned, the gain to Beninia will consist in the removal of starvation and the improvement of personal and public health. That is, if returns from the markets we intend going into do no more than pay for the guaranteed interest on the original loan.
“Much mor
e likely, we shall also enjoy a very high standard of literacy and technical skill, the fruits of better housing, transport, harbour facilities, housing, school buildings, everything. Especially we shall have power in every house for the first time ever.”
His voice dropped away to a whisper and his eyes went out of focus as though he were staring at a dream.
“When you say there will be no taxes, Ram!” Obomi said sharply. “You mean there will be fixed prices and deductions of income at source? There will have to be a great deal of enforcement, and I have always hated enforcing regulations on my people!”
“Ah—it should not be necessary,” Ibusa muttered.
“Why not?”
“Suppose inflation actually runs at the probable level of five per cent in the first year,” Ibusa said. “We shall withhold the amount of purchasing power corresponding to what would cause a ten per cent increase. There will be a real rise in the standard of living anyway because of the free issues and the loans; the pinch will not be felt. We shall then have surplus purchasing power to release in the year following, when people are growing accustomed to their new prosperity. But in the meantime we shall have loaned out the money we withheld and it will have grown, giving us the power to withhold a further portion, and so on. At the end of twenty years, when the groundwork of the project is complete and everything is in operation, that fund of reserved purchasing power will be used to buy back for the country whatever item still mortgaged is judged most essential to our independent development. It might be the new harbour facilities, it might be the power-system, it might be anything, but there will be enough to let us make the right choice.”