“We are firing one warning shot,” the officer said.
Indeed, the in-ship report came immediately: “Laser beam at twelve o’clock.”
“Saturn does seem to be competent at holing unarmed ships,” I reminded the officer.
Suddenly the screen went blank. “Bluff successful,” Thorley remarked laconically.
“Even the Saturnines do not knowingly shoot down a governor,” I said.
“But they did hole that passenger ship.”
I only smiled. The truth was, I was not completely certain of my position. Even a peaceful bear, when stung, can strike, and Saturn was not noticeably peaceful. But I believed the odds were strongly in my favor. The Saturnines had known we were coming from the time we left Jupiter; had they really intended to blast us, they would have done so well before this. We were indulging in a pose, a ritual confrontation. Meanwhile, our ship continued toward the planet unmolested.
Two hours later we were signaled again. “Governor Hubris,” a new officer said. “Please adjust course for orbit at Ring Station; a shuttle will convey your party to Scow.”
“Understood,” I said. This was victory indeed, for Scow was the capital bubble of North Saturn, the seat of government for the Union of Saturnine Republics. They were now accepting our visit.
“If you will pardon the curiosity of a political innocent,” Thorley said with his special brand of irony, “what guarantees do you have against arrest and execution as a spy?”
“The Governor of Sunshine, former ambassador to the Independent Satellite of Ganymede?” I asked with similar innocence. “Our esteemed president would be forced to make an issue.”
“And you have placed Tocsin in the same bind you have placed Saturn,” he said. “However much he detests your intestines in private, Tocsin can not undermine you in public. This could precipitate Solar War Three.”
“Oh, I doubt it will come to that,” I said in an offhand manner.
He laughed. “One must admire your finesse, Governor, if not your politics. To make the Eagle and the Bear waltz to your tune involuntarily.”
“Finesse does have its compensations,” I agreed.
“Still, I want to advise you in advance that I will be most perturbed if this leads to my obliteration in SW III.”
“I will take your perturbation under advisement at that time.”
“You characters would make light of Sol going nova tomorrow,” Spirit muttered.
Thorley raised an eyebrow. “Indeed, there would be much light then.”
We decelerated and moved to the Ring Station, which was situated inside the orbit of the rings proper. We docked and our limited party transferred to the U.S.R. shuttle ship. The crew of our yacht would wait until we returned, confined to the ship. We were conducted by grim non-English-speaking troopers that made Hopie quite nervous; she stayed very close to Megan, hanging on to her hand. In due course we were in the giant bubble of Scow.
The adults were guarded about reactions, but now Hopie was thrilled. She had never before been to a city-bubble of this size. Of course, once we got into the internal labyrinth, it was difficult to distinguish it from any other, except for the Cyrillic printing on the signs.
We were ushered into a private chamber where three Saturnines sat behind a long table. One of them was Khukov. He stood up and leaned over the table to shake my hand. “Welcome to Saturn, Governor Hubris,” he said in English.
“Good to meet you again, Admiral,” I replied in the same language, noting his elevation in rank. His career was evidently proceeding apace.
“Please be seated, Governor Hubris—you and your party. We have much to discuss.”
“Indeed we do, Admiral. Are you empowered to arrange for reparations?”
“What is he saying?” one of the others asked in Russian.
“He is demanding reparations,” Khukov explained in that language.
“Reparations!” the man repeated indignantly. “Tell him we’ll execute him and his disreputable party first!”
Khukov smiled at me graciously. “The Commissar wishes to reassure himself that your party is quite comfortable. He is eager to change your status if you are not.”
I returned the smile. “Certainly, for the moment,” I agreed. Then, in Spanish, I said to Spirit, “These characters haven’t decided how to handle us.”
“Then demand more than we can get, so we have a fallback position,” she replied in Spanish.
“Now I am sure you are reasonable people,” Khukov said in English. “You know we cannot make reparations!”
“Promise them a nice tour of the city,” the Commissar muttered in Russian. “Him and his bastard child.”
They didn’t know that I knew Russian—or they were testing me. I was sure that Khukov had not told. I showed no comprehension. “Reparations and an apology—and the bodies,” I said firmly in English.
“Everybody in the System knows his wife was already beyond bearing age when he married her,” the third Saturnine remarked in Russian, chuckling. “She was a fool to adopt the spawn of his mistress.”
“My companions are not sanguine about that,” Khukov said. “You know it was a spy ship.”
“You know your gunners got trigger-happy and shot down a civilian ship by accident!” I retorted.
“And now the fools are locked into their error,” Spirit said in Spanish.
Khukov glanced at her, nodding.
“He understands Spanish!” she hissed, alarmed.
“Now how could that be?” I asked her blandly.
She shook her head. “I don’t know! But—”
“He speaks Spanish no more than I speak Russian,” I told her, and turned to face Khukov. Thus did I advise him that I had not broken faith; I had not even informed my sister of our private deal.
I felt Spirit’s eye on me. She was catching on now—to both parts of the deal. She made no further comment.
“Let us communicate as clearly as we can, in our circumstances,” Khukov said to me in English. “Perhaps it is possible for planets as far apart as ours to achieve some compromise that will benefit both.”
“One would hope so,” I agreed.
“Naturally the loyal Saturn forces could not have made an error, even if the vessel did resemble in outline a type of Jupiter cruiser,” he continued. “They holed a spy ship. It cannot be otherwise. Yet we concede the possibility that some civilians were aboard, and we bear no animosity toward those unfortunate victims of imperialist deceit.”
“Then you will return our bodies to us,” I said.
“As a gesture of goodwill by the magnanimous Union of Saturnine Republics—”
“And so forth,” I agreed. “And the apology?”
“Apology!” the Commissar exclaimed in Russian, evidently picking up my meaning. “The foolish Jupiter lackey should apologize to us for smirching our space! Tell him to eat canine offal!”
“For abating the menace of the spy ship we should apologize?” Khukov asked me in English.
“Tell the Communist clown to go spy his own posterior,” Spirit told me in Spanish, picking up the nature of this dialogue. Hopie stifled a giggle, and Megan frowned; she had learned enough of the language to grasp the insult.
“For mistaking a strayed civilian ship,” I said in English, without hint of humor.
Khukov shrugged. “Suppose we apologize for underestimating the foolhardiness of your blundering attempt to spy on our planet?”
“Let’s go on to reparations,” I suggested.
“Reparations!” the Commissar exclaimed in Russian. “Let’s just line the whole troupe up against the wall for trainee laser practice!”
“And trigger System War Three!” Khukov snapped back at him in Russian.
“Why? His own capitalist president ordered him to turn back, calling him a fecal-face!”
So they had intercepted that transmission, too. Tocsin’s privacy coding had not been effective against the spy mechanism of the Saturnines.
“His president is the worst of the running dogs,” Khukov replied. “Naturally he threw a fit when the governor refused to turn back, because it showed him up for the bumbling ass he is. We can best affront Tocsin by catering to Hubris.”
Slowly the Commissar smiled. “True! True! It is the big poison we want to deal with, not the little one.”
Poison—that was probably a play on the pronunciation of Tocsin as “toxin,” though it could have derived from a confusion in translation. Certainly they didn’t like Tocsin.
Khukov returned to me, in English, “The government of Saturn has deep concern for the common people of any planet. Perhaps we could provide funds to facilitate the proper burial of those who have been so far exploited by the capitalists that they lack the money to accomplish this themselves.”
I nodded, accepting the pretext for the payment of money.
This was more of a concession than I had expected; Khukov evidently had the real authority here. “For burial,” I agreed.
He smiled grimly. “Your president will be pleased, no?” Spirit, Megan, and even Hopie smiled, and Thorley coughed. The Commissar chuckled. All knew that Tocsin would be privately furious at my success but would not dare to disparage it openly.
Khukov and I shook hands formally, sealing the understanding. “And while we wait for the arrangements to be complete, we shall give your party a welcome that will please your president even more,” he said.
Then I stood and shook hands with the Commissar. “You are lucky, you imperialist cur,” he said in Russian, smiling broadly. “You should have been executed, and your cuckolded wife and bastard child too.”
“And you irritate my penis, you ignorant double-dealing pederastic Bolshevik,” I returned in Spanish with just as broad a smile.
Khukov almost visibly bit his tongue. “It is nice to overhear the exchange of such sincere remarks between supposed adversaries,” he said in English. “I’m sure you hold each other in similar esteem.”
“Why do I get the feeling I’m missing something?” Thorley murmured.
“You’re not missing anything,” Spirit returned darkly.
They gave us an official welcome that was more reminiscent of that accorded the head of a major planet than an uninvited intruder. But, of course, they had to make it seem as if this had been their idea; it was a matter of face. There was a banquet with distinctly unproletarian trimmings. Megan and I were feted at the head table with the high-ranking dignitaries of the supposedly classless Saturn society, while Spirit and Thorley and Hopie had a table with the ranking wives. There were translators to render the remarks of the hosts into English. After that there was—would you believe it?—a parade in our honor. We rode under a massive red hammer-and-sickle banner while the enormous crowd cheered. I was almost afraid they would begin chanting “Hubris! Hubris!” but at least we were spared that.
“Tocsin will be apoplectic,” Spirit remarked, enjoying it.
“I fear I will never live this down,” Thorley muttered, but he didn’t seem to be as unhappy as he might have been. He would have an excellent story to write.
Hopie happily waved to the crowd.
In due course we returned to our yacht with a cargo of four frozen Sunshine bodies that included the two Hispanics and the representative. The rest would follow in a Saturn freighter. It would hardly have been possible to transport them all in proper condition in the yacht. We weighed anchor and put out to space with an escort of Saturnine Naval vessels.
Thorley got to work on his dispatches. Not eager to implicate himself in this ultraliberal connivance, he gave me all the discredit for this sally to Saturn. But, by whatever mischance, I had (he concluded) somehow managed to render my planet and president a signal service. It seemed that Thorley himself did not admire Tocsin personally and could not resist that particular needle.
Then the Saturn forces turned us loose for the long drift home. We played cards and board games to while away the time, and debated the fine points of liberal versus conservative philosophy.
By the time we docked at Hassee I was notorious across the System, as the governor who had braved the Bear’s jaws and won. For some reason there was little other than silence from the White Bubble.
CHAPTER 13
IMPEACHMENT
But politics, even more than life, is a phenomenon of ups and downs. The day I set foot in Ybor after the Saturn excursion, I could perhaps have run for president and won. Six months later it was all I could do to avoid being lynched.
I should provide some background on my abrupt shift of status.
If there was one thing I intended to accomplish it was the elimination of the drug trade. Illicit, mind-modifying, addictive substances were pouring into the planet from the rest of the System and into the north from the south, and the state of Sunshine was perhaps the primary access point. The drugs were illegal, but that seemed only to make the trade more lucrative for the criminal element. In my time in the Navy I had acted to cut off the major middlemen of this trade, the Samoans pirate band, but like a hydra, the drug trade had sprouted new heads and seemed undiminished. Now I had opportunity to strike more directly, for the key to it was the market; cut off the market, and the supply will dwindle. A marketless product is doomed.
The prior efforts of the Sunshine enforcement agency had been sieve-like, and it seemed to me that there had to be corruption. I intended to weed it out. I contacted Roulette Phist of the Belt— that is to say, Rue, my lovely onetime wife—and she used her connections to locate a crew of about fifty drug experts who were loaned to us. These were not the kind that pontificants on the physiology and psychology of addiction use as examples; these were men and women and children who could, in some cases, literally smell the drugs and who knew the sinister by-paths of distribution. I did not inquire how these folk had come by their expertise; I interviewed them only to verify that they intended to serve our interest faithfully. Some few I rejected, but in general Rue’s selection was excellent; we quickly formed the most savvy drug-control team extant.
We put them to work first merely to identify the routes, not to close them. That was one reason why I seemed to have accomplished little in my first year in office; we were still in the developmental stage. I did not want another hydra experience; I wanted to kill the entire monster at one blow, when I finally did strike. The agents were instructed to accept any bribes offered and to report them privately, spending the money for themselves in ways that no ordinary enforcement agents would, so as to allay any suspicion. They enjoyed that part of it. For six months they infiltrated the delivery network of Sunshine, satisfying the professionals that business remained as usual; the new governor would not be any more effective at cutting the pipeline than any other had been.
Then we struck. We went after the personnel, not the drugs, and we got them. The line had been cut, and ninety percent of the drug flow ceased. Overnight.
Meanwhile, we had instituted another program: DeTox. This was intended to wean the clients away from the criminal sources. We had been confiscating illicit drug shipments all along, as we intercepted them; that was standard, but everyone knew that only twenty percent of the total flow was tapped that way, and the drug moguls simply increased the flow to compensate. In fact, news of the drug busts kept the consumers scared and therefore willing to pay higher prices. Thus the busts were actually good for business. The drug movers made more money than they lost, as a result of the busts; this was a fact that the law-enforcement agencies had taken centuries to catch on to. At any rate, we did not destroy the drugs we intercepted; we set up secret laboratories to test and refine them, and built up stores of high-quality stuff. We let it be known that this was available on the gray market; addicts could buy from us cheaper than from the criminal network.
We kept a legal crew operating full time to cover our legal traces, knowing that others would not understand. Thorley, of course, got wind of it and blew the whistle; there was an immediate fuss that died out after a few days, the net
effect of which was to alert any addicts who had not yet gotten the news that this competitive source of supply was available. Thorley hammered away at us periodically, when other news was scarce, asking pointed questions we did not answer—and steadily our business increased. My political enemies, from Tocsin on down, were silent, hoping that all I needed was enough rope to hang myself. In that, perhaps, they were correct.
Then we cut the line, and abruptly there was very little available on the criminal circuit. Prices skyrocketed. Suddenly the addicts came to us in swarms. All a person had to do was identify himself, take his dose at our station, and pay for it. If he had no money we would trade for information. We were rapidly acquiring a comprehensive file of reasonably reliable tips to supplement what our other team was bringing in; we cross-referenced it constantly and cut off those who gave us false leads.
Naturally the hydra’s heads sprouted again, but this time we were watching. Our moles traced the new lines as they developed. It was harder for the dealers, because now they had serious competition for clients and could not jack up their prices. Not only were Sunshine prices lower, but quality was higher and reliability much better. The greater part of the market was now ours. In due course we struck again at the illegals and wiped them out, again.
I had become a successful drug mogul, but my heart was pure. I knew it was necessary first to extirpate the criminal connection; then we could deal effectively with the problem of individual drug abuse. The cries of outrage sponsored by Thorley’s exposé’s diminished; increasingly the authorities elsewhere on the planet were watching us. It seemed that we now had the most effective drug-control program on Jupiter. True, there were serious legal and ethical questions about our operation. But we obtained our merchandise free, by seizing it from the competition, and our operational costs were covered by the fees we charged our clients. Our books were on public record; our program cost the taxpayer nothing. Crime was dropping, partly because we now knew who the criminals were, and partly because they no longer had as much incentive to commit crime. About half of all crime in the state had been related to the drug trade; that was no longer so. Some dealers turned themselves in, plea-bargaining for their drugs; we imprisoned them for their crimes but provided them with their doses in prison. One might have thought that such people would consider that to be no bargain, but it seemed that they considered themselves better off than they had been outside. On the street illicit dealers were now killing each other for increased shares of the diminishing market; we offered safety.