Orbitsville

two

He had, if he was very lucky, about one hundred minutes. The figure was arrived at by assuming the President had been precise when she told Garamond to wait an extra two hours. There was a further proviso — that it had been her intention to leave her son alone with him all that time. With the full span of a hundred minutes at his disposal, Garamond decided, he had a chance; but any one of a dozen personal servants had only to go looking for Harald, any one of a thousand visitors had only to notice a bloodstain…

The numbers in the game of death were trembling and tumbling behind his eyes as he stepped off the outward bound slideway where it reached the main reception area. His official transport was waiting to take him straight to the shuttle terminal at North Field, and — in spite of the risks associated with the driver being in radio contact with Starflight House — that still seemed the quickest and most certain way of reaching his ship. The vast ice-green hall of the concourse was crowded with men and women coming off their afternoon shifts in the surrounding administrative buildings. They seemed relaxed and happy, bemused by the generosity of the lingering sunlight. Garamond swore inwardly as he shouldered through conflicting currents and eddies of people, doing his best to move quickly without attracting attention.

I’m a dead man, he kept thinking in detached wonderment. No matter what I do, no matter how my luck holds out in the next couple of hours… I’m a dead man. And my wife is a dead woman. And my son is a dead child. Even if the ion tide holds strong and fills my wings, we’re all dead - because there’s no place to hide. There’s only one other world, and Elizabeth’s ships will be waiting there…

A face turned towards him from the crowd, curiously, and Garamond realized he had made a sound. He smiled — recreating himself in his own image of a successful flickerwing captain, clothed in the black-and-silver which was symbolic of star oceans — and the face slid away, satisfied that it had made a mistake in locating the source of the despairing murmur. Garamond gnawed his lip while he covered the remaining distance to his transport which was stacked in one of the reserved magazines near the concourse. The sharp-eyed middle-aged driver saw him approaching, and had the vehicle brought up to ground level by the time Garamond reached the silo.

“Thanks.” Garamond answered the man’s salute, grateful for the small saving in time, and got inside the upholstered shell.

“I thought you’d be in a hurry, sir.” The driver’s eyes stared knowingly at him from the rear view mirror.

“Oh?” Garamond controlled a spasm of unreasonable fear — this was not the way his arrest would come about. He eyed the back of the driver’s neck which was ruddy, deeply creased and had a number of long-established blackheads.

“Yes, sir. All the Starflight commanders are in a hurry to reach the field today. The weather reports aren’t good, I hear.”

Garamond nodded and tried to look at ease as the vehicle surged forward with a barely perceptible whine from its magnetic engines. “I think I’ll catch the tide,” he said evenly. “At least, I hope so — my family are coming to see me off.”

The driver’s narrow face showed some surprise. “I thought you were going direct…”

“A slight change of plan — we’re calling for my wife and son. You remember the address?”

“Yes, sir. I have it here.”

“Good. Get there as quickly as you can.” With a casual movement Garamond broke the audio connection between the vehicle’s two compartments and picked up the nearest communicator set. He punched in his home code and held the instrument steady with his knees while he waited for the screen to come to life and show that his call had been accepted. Supposing Aileen and Chris had gone out? The boy had been upset — again Garamond remembered him shaking his fist instead of waving goodbye, expressing in the slight change of gesture all the emotions which racked his small frame — and Aileen could have taken him away for an afternoon of distraction and appeasement. If that were the case…

“Vance!” Aileen’s face crystallized in miniature between his hands. “I was sure you’d gone. Where are you?”

“I’m on my way back to the house, be there in ten minutes.”

“Back here? But…”

“Something has happened, Aileen. I’m bringing you and Chris with me to the field. Is he there?”

“He’s out on the patio. But, Vance, you never let us see you off.”

“I…” Garamond hesitated, and decided it could be better all round if his wife were to be kept in ignorance at this stage. “I’ve changed my mind about some things. Now, get Chris ready to leave the house as soon as I get there.”

Aileen raised her shoulders uncertainly. “Vance, do you think it’s the best thing for him? I mean you’ve been away from the house for three hours and he’s just begun to get over his first reactions — now you’re going to put him through it all again.”

“I told you something has come up.” How many pet dogs, Garamond asked himself, did I see around the Presidential suite this afternoon? Five? Six?

“What has come up?”

“I’ll explain later.” At what range can a dog scent a corpse? Liz’s brood of pets could be the biggest threat of all. “Please get Chris ready.“

Aileen shook her head slightly. “I’m sorry, Vance, but I don’t…”

“Aileen!” Garamond deliberately allowed an edge of panic to show in his voice, using it to penetrate the separate universe of normalcy in which his wife still existed. “I can’t explain it now, but you and Chris must be ready to come to the field with me within the next few minutes. Don’t argue any more, just do what I’m asking.”

He broke the connection and forced himself to sit back, wondering if he had already said too much for the benefit of any communications snoops who could be monitoring the public band. The car was travelling west on the main Akranes auto-link, surging irregularly as it jockeyed for position in the traffic. It occurred to Garamond that the driver’s performance was not as good as it had been on the way out to Starflight House, perhaps through lack of concentration. On an impulse he reconnected the vehicle’s intercom.

“…at his home,” the driver was saying. “Expect to reach North Field in about twenty minutes.”

Garamond cleared his throat. “What are you doing?”

“Reporting in, sir.”

“Why?” “Standing orders. All the fleet drivers keep Starflight Centradata informed about their movements.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Sir?”

“What did you say about my movements?”

The driver’s shoulders stirred uneasily, causing his Starflight sunburst emblems to blink redly with reflected light. “I just said you decided to pick up your family on the way to North Field.”

“Don’t make any further reports.”

“Sir?”

“As a captain in the Starflight Exploratory Arm I think I can make my way around this part of Iceland without a nursemaid.”

“I’m sorry, but…”

“Just drive the car.” Garamond fought to control the unreasoning anger he felt against the man in front. “And go faster.”

“Yes, sir.” The creases in the driver’s weatherbeaten neck deepened as he hunched over the wheel.

Garamond made himself sit quietly, with closed eyes, motionless except for a slight rubbing of his palms against his knees which failed completely to remove the perspiration. He tried to visualize what was happening back on the hill. Was the routine of Elizabeth’s court proceeding as on any other afternoon, with the boards and committees and tribunals deliberating in the pillared halls, and the President moving among them, complacently deflecting and vibrating the webstrands of empire with her very presence? Or had someone begun to notice Harald’s absence? And his own? He opened his eyes and gazed sombrely at the unrolling scenery outside the car. The umbra of commercial buildings which extended for several kilometres around Starflight House was giving way to the first of the company-owned residential developments. As an S.E.A. commander, Garamond had been entitled to one of the ‘choice’ locations, which in Starflight usage tended to mean closest to Elizabeth’s elevated palace. At quiet moments on the bridge of his ship Garamond had often thought about how the sheer massiveness of her power had locally deformed the structure of language in exactly the same way as a giant sun was able to twist space around itself so that captive worlds, though believing themselves to be travelling in straight lines, were held in orbit. In the present instance, however, he was satisfied with the physics of Elizabeth’s gravitation because it meant that his home was midway between Starflight House and the North Field, and he was losing the minimum of time in collecting his family.

Even before the vehicle had halted outside the pyramidical block of apartments, Garamond had the door open and was walking quickly to the elevator. He stepped out of it on the third floor, went to his own door and let himself in. The familiar, homely surroundings seemed to crowd in on him for an instant, creating a new sense of shock over the fact that life as he knew it had ended. For a moment he felt like a ghost, visiting scenes to which he was no longer relevant.

“What’s the matter, Vance?” Aileen emerged from a bedroom, dressed as always in taut colourful silks. Her plump, brown-skinned face and dark eyes showed concern.

“I’ll explain later.” He put his arms around her and held her for a second. “Where’s Chris?”

“Here I am, Daddy!” The boy came running and swarmed up Garamond like a small animal, clinging with all four limbs. “You came back.”

“Come on, son — we’re going to the field.” Garamond held Chris above his head and shook him, imitating a start-of-vacation gesture, then handed the child to his wife. It had been the second time within the hour that he had picked up a light, childish body. “The car’s waiting for us. You take Chris down to it and I’ll follow in a second.”

“You still haven’t told me what this is all about.”

“Later, later!” Garamond decided that if he were stopped before the shuttle got off the ground there might still be a faint chance for Aileen and the boy if she could truthfully swear she had no idea what had been going on. He pushed her out into the corridor, then strode back into the apartment’s general storage area which was hidden by a free-floating screen of varicoloured luminosity. It took him only a few seconds to open the box containing his old target pistol and to fill an ammunition clip.The long-barrelled, saw-handled pistol snagged the material of his uniform as he thrust it out of sight in his jacket. Acutely conscious of the weighty bulge under his left arm, he ran back through the living space. On an impulse he snatched an ornament — a solid gold snail with ruby eyes — from a shelf, and went out into the corridor. Aileen was holding the elevator door open with one hand and trying to control Chris with the other.

“Let’s go,” Garamond said cheerfully, above the deafening ratchets and escapement of the clock behind his eyes. He closed the elevator door and pressed the ‘DOWN’ button. At ground level Chris darted ahead through the long entrance hall and scrambled into the waiting vehicle. There were few people about, and none that Garamond could identify as neighbours, but he dared not risk running and the act of walking normally brought a cool sheen to his forehead. The driver gave Aileen a grudging salute and held the car door open while she got in. Garamond sat down opposite his wife in the rear of the vehicle and, when it had moved off, manufactured a smile for her.

She shook her dark head impatiently. “Now will you tell me what’s happening?”

“You’re coming to see me off, that’s all.” Garamond glanced at Chris, who was kneeling at the rear window, apparently absorbed in the receding view. “Chris should enjoy it.”

“But you said it was important.”

“It was important for me to spend a little extra time with you and Chris.”

Aileen looked baffled. “What did you bring from the apartment?”

“Nothing.” Garamond moved his left shoulder slightly to conceal the bulge made by the pistol.

“But I can see it.” She leaned forward, caught his hand and opened his fingers, revealing the gold snail. It was a gift he had bought Aileen on their honeymoon and he realized belatedly that the reason he had snatched it was that the little ornament was the symbolical cornerstone of their home. Aileen’s eyes widened briefly and she turned her head away, making an abrupt withdrawal. Garamond closed his eyes, wondering what his wife’s intuition had told her, wondering how many minutes he had left

At that moment, a minor official on the domestic staff of Starflight House was moving uncertainly through the contrived Italian Renaissance atmosphere of the carved hill. His name was Carlos Pennario and he was holding leads to which were attached two of the President’s favourite spaniels. The doubts which plagued his mind were caused by the curious behaviour of the dogs, coupled with certain facts about his conditions of employment. Both animals, their long ears flapping audibly with excitement, were pulling him towards a section of the shady terrace which ringed the hill just at the executive and Presidential levels. Pennario, who was naturally inquisitive, had never seen the spaniels behave in this way before and he was tempted to give them their heads — but, as a Grade 4 employee, he was not permitted to ascend to the executive levels. In normal circumstances such considerations would not have held him back for long, but only two days earlier he had fallen foul of his immediate boss, a gnome-like Scot called Arthur Kemp, and had been promised demotion next time he put a foot wrong.

Pennario held on to the snuffling, straining dogs while he gazed towards a group of statues which shone like red gold in the dying sunlight. A tall, hard-looking man in the black uniform of a flickerwing captain had been leaning on the stone balustrade near the statues a little earlier in the afternoon. The moody captain seemed to have departed and there was nobody else visible on the terrace, yet the spaniels were going crazy trying to get up there. It was not a world-shaking mystery, but to Pennario it represented an intriguing diversion from the utter boredom of his job.

He hesitated, scanning the slopes above, then allowed the spaniels to pull him up the broad shallow steps to the terrace, their feet scrabbling on the smooth stone. Once on the upper level, the dogs headed straight for the base on which the bronze figures stood, then with low whines burrowed into the shrubbery behind.

Pennario leaned over them, parted the dark green leaves with his free arm, and looked down into the cave-like dimness.

They needed another thirty minutes, Garamond decided. If the discovery of Harald’s body did not take place within that time he and his family would be clear of the atmosphere on one of the S.E.A. shuttles, before the alarm could be broadcast. They would not be out of immediate danger but the ship lying in polar orbit, the Bissendorf, was his own private territory, a small enclave in which the laws of the Elizabethan universe did not hold full sway. Up there she could still destroy him, and eventually would, but it would be more difficult than on Earth where at a word she could mobilize ten thousand men against him.

“I need to go to the toilet,” Chris announced, turning from the rear window with an apologetic expression on his round face. He pummelled his abdomen as if to punish it for the intervention.

“You can wait till we reach the field.” Aileen pulled him down on to her knee and enclosed him with smooth brown arms.

A sense of unreality stole over Garamond as he watched his wife and son. Both were wearing lightweight indoor clothing and, of course, had no other belongings with them. It was incredible, unthinkable that — dressed as they were and so unprepared — they should be snatched from their natural ambience of sunlight and warm breezes, sheltering walls and quiet gardens, and that they should be projected into the deadliness of the space between the stars. The air in the car seemed to thin down abruptly, forcing Garamond to take deep breaths. He gazed at the diorama of buildings and foliage beyond the car windows, trying to think about his movements for the next vital half-hour, but his mind refused to work constructively. His thoughts lapsed into a fugue, a recycling of images and shocked sensory fragments. He watched for the hundredth time as the fatal millimetres of daylight opened between Harald’s silhouette and the uncomprehending metal of the statue. And the boy’s body had been so light. Almost as light as Chris. How could a package contain all the bone and blood and muscle and organs necessary to support life, and yet be so light? So insubstantial that a fall of three or four metres…

“Look, Dad!” Chris moved within the organic basketwork of his mother’s arms. “There’s the field. Can we go on to your shuttle?”

“I’ll try to arrange it.” Garamond stared through the wavering blur of the North Field’s perimeter fence, wondering if he would see any signs of unusual activity.

Carlos Pennario allowed the shrubs to spring together again and, for the first time since his youth, he crossed himself.

He backed away from what he had seen, dragging the frantic dogs with him, and looked around for help. There was nobody in sight. He opened his mouth with the intention of shouting at the top of his voice, of unburdening his dismay on the sleepy air, then several thoughts occurred to him almost at once. Pennario had seen Elizabeth Lindstrom only a few times, and always at a distance, but he had heard many stories told in the night-time quietness of the staff dormitory. He would have given a year’s wages rather than be brought before her with the news that he had allowed one of her spaniels to choke on a chicken bone.

Now he was almost in the position of having to face Elizabeth in person and describe his part in the finding of her son’s corpse.

Pennario tried to imagine what the President might do to the bringer of such news before she regained whatever slight measure of self-control she was supposed to have…

Then there was the matter of his superior, Arthur Kemp. Pennario had no right to be on the terrace in the first place, and to a man like Kemp that one transgression would be suggestive, would be proof, of others. He had no idea what had happened to the dead boy, but he knew the way Kemp’s mind worked. Assuming that Pennario lived long enough to undergo an investigation, Kemp would swear to anything to avoid any association with guilt.

The realization that he was in mortal danger stimulated Pennario into decisive action. He knelt, gathered the spaniels into his arms and walked quickly down the steps to the lower levels. Shocked and afraid though he was, his mind retained those qualities which had lifted him successfully from near-starvation in Mexico to one of the few places in the world where there was enough air for a man to breathe. Locked away in his memory was a comprehensive timetable of Kemp’s daily movements in and around Starflight House, and according to that schedule the acidulous little Scot would shortly be making his final inspection tour of the afternoon. The tour usually took him along the circular terrace, past the shrubbery in which Harald’s body was hidden — and how much better it would have been if Domestic Supervisor Kemp had made the fearful discovery.

Pennario kept slanting downwards across the hill until he had reached the lowest point from which he could still see a sector of the upper terrace and gauge Kemp’s progress along it. He moved into the shade of an ivy-covered loggia, set the dogs on the ground and pretended to be busy adjusting their silver collars. The excited animals fought to get free, but Pennario held them firmly in check.

It was important to him that they did not make their predictable dash to the terrace until Kemp was in exactly the right place to become involved with their discovery. Pennario glanced at his watch.

“Any minute now, my little friends,” he whispered. “Any minute now.”

In contrast to what Garamond had feared, the field seemed quieter than usual, its broad expanses of ferrocrete mellowed to the semblance of sand by the fleeting sunlight. Low on the western horizon a complexity of small clouds was assembled like a fabulous army, their helmets and crests glowing with fire, and several vaporous banners reached towards the zenith in deepening pink. As the car drew to a halt outside the S.E.A. complex Garamond shielded his eyes, looked towards his assigned take-off point and saw the squat outline of the waiting shuttle. Its door was open and the boarding steps were in place. The sight filled him with a powerful urge to drive to the shuttle, get Aileen and Chris on board, and blast off towards safety. There were certain pre-flight formalities, however, and take off without observing them could lead to the wrong sort of radio message being beamed up to the Bissendorf ahead of him. He pushed a heavy lock of hair away from his forehead and smiled for the benefit of Aileen and the driver.

“Some papers to sign in here, then we’ll take the slidewalk out to the shuttle,” he said easily as he opened the car door and got out.

“I thought Chris and I’d be going up to the observation floor,” Aileen replied, not moving from her seat.

“There’s no fun in that, is there, Chris?” Garamond lifted the boy off Afleen’s knee and set him down on the steps of the S.E.A. building. “What’s the point in having a Dad who’s a flickerwing captain if you can’t get a few extra privileges? You’d like to look right inside the shuttle, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, Dad.” Chris nodded, but with a curious reserve, as if he had sensed something of Aileen’s unease.

“Of course, you would.” Garamond took Aileen’s hand, drew her out of the car and slammed the door. “That’s all, driver — we can look after ourselves from here on.” The driver glanced back once, without speaking, and accelerated away towards the transport pool.

Aileen caught Garamond’s arm. “We’re alone now, Vance. What’s… ?”

“Now you two stand right here on these steps and don’t move till I come out. This won’t take long.” Garamond sprinted up the steps, returned the salutes of the guards at the top, and hurried towards the S.E.A. Preflight Centre. The large square room looked unfamiliar when he entered, as though seen through the eyes of the young Vance Garamond who had been so impressed by it at the beginning of his first exploratory command. He ran to the long desk and slapped down his flight authorization documents.

“You’re late, Captain Garamond,” commented a heavily built ex-quartermaster called Herschell, who habitually addressed outgoing captains with a note of rueful challenge which was meant to remind them he had not always held a desk job.

“I know — I couldn’t get away from Liz.” Garamond seized a stylus and began scribbling his name on various papers as they were fed to him. “Like that, was it? She couldn’t let you go?”

“That’s the way it was.”

“Pity. I’d say you’ve missed the tide.” Herschell’s pink square face was sympathetic.

“Oh?”

“Yeah — look at the map.” Herschell pointed up at the vast solid-image chart of the Solar System and surrounding volume of interstellar space which floated below the domed ceiling. The solar wind, represented by yellow radiance, was as strong as ever and Garamond saw the healthy, bow-shaped shock wave on the sunward side of Earth, where the current impacted on the planet’s geomagnetic field. Data on the inner spirals of the solar wind, however, were of interest only to interplanetary travellers — and his concern was with the ion count at the edge of the system and beyond. Garamond searched for the great arc of the shock front near the orbit of Uranus where the solar wind, attenuated by distance from Sol, built up pressure against the magnetic field of the galaxy. For a moment he saw nothing, then his eyes picked out an almost invisible amber halo, so faint that it could have represented nothing more than a tenth of an ion per cubic centimetre. He had rarely seen the front looking so feeble. It appeared that the sun was in a niggardly mood, unwilling to assist his ship far up the long gravity slope to interstellar space.

Garamond shifted his attention to the broad straggling bands of green, blue and red which plotted the galactic tides of fast-moving corpuscles as they swept across the entire region. These vagrant sprays of energetic particles and their movements meant as much to him as wind, wave and tide had to the skipper of a transoceanic sailing ship. All spacecraft built by Starflight — which meant all spacecraft built on Earth — employed intense magnetic fields to sweep up interstellar atomic debris for use as reaction mass. The system made it possible to conduct deep-space voyages in ships weighing as little as ten thousand tons, as against the million tons which would have been the minimum for a vessel which had to transport its own reaction mass.

Flickerwing ships had their own disadvantages in that their efficiency was subject to spatial ‘weather’. The ideal mission profile was for a ship to accelerate steadily to the midpoint of its journey and decelerate at the same rate for the remainder of the trip, but where the harvest of charged particles was poor the rate of speed-change fell off. If that occurred in the first half of a voyage it meant that the vessel took longer than planned to reach destination; if it occurred in the second half the ship was deprived of the means to discard velocity and would storm through its target system at unmanageable speed, sometimes not coming to a halt until it had overshot by light-days. It was to minimize such uncertainties that Starflight maintained chains of automatic sensor stations whose reports, transmitted by low-energy tachyon beams, were continuously fed into weather charts.

And, as Garamond immediately saw, the conditions in which he hoped to achieve high-speed flight were freakishly, damnably bad.

More than half the volume of space covered by the map seemed entirely void of corpuscular flux, and such fronts as were visible in the remainder were fleeing away to the galactic south. Only one wisp of useful density — possibly the result of heavy particles entangling themselves in an irregularity in the interplanetary magnetic field — reached as far back as the orbit of Mars, and even that was withdrawing at speed.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Garamond said simply.

Herschell handed him the traditional leather briefcase containing the flight authorization documents. “Why don’t you take off out of it, Captain? The Bissendorf is ready to travel, and I can sign the rest of this stuff by proxy.” “Thanks.” Garamond took the briefcase and ran for the door.

“Don’t let that ole bit of dust get away,” Herschell called after him, one flickerwing man to another. “Scoop it up good.”

Garamond sprinted along the entrance hall, relieved at being able to respond openly to his growing sense of urgency. The sight of ships’ commanders running for the slidewalks was quite a common one in the S.E.A. Centre when the weather was breaking. He found Aileen and Chris on the front steps, exactly where he had left them. Aileen was looking tired and worried, and holding the boy close to her side.

“All clear,” he said. He caught Aileen by the upper arm and urged her towards the slidewalk tunnel. She fell in step with him readily enough but he could sense her mounting unease. “Let’s go!”

“Where to, Vance?” She spoke quietly, but he understood she was asking him the big question, communicating on a treasured personal level which neither of them would ever willingly choose to disrespect. He glanced down at Chris. They were on the slidewalk now, slanting down into the tunnel and the boy seemed fascinated by the softly tremoring ride.

“When I was waiting to see the President this afternoon I was asked to take care of young Harold Lindstrom for an hour…” The enormity of what he had to say stilled the words in his throat.

“What happened, Vance?”

“I… I didn’t take care of him very well. He fell and killed himself.”

“Oh!” The colour seeped away from beneath the tan of Aileen’s face. “But how did you get away from… ?”

“Nobody saw him fall. I bid the body in some bushes.”

“And now we’re running?”

“As fast as we can go, sweet.”

Aileen put her hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Do you think Elizabeth would… ?”

“Automatically. Instinctively. There’d be no way for her not to do it.”

Aileen’s chin puckered as she fought to control the muscles around her mouth. “Oh, Vance! This is terrible. Chris and I can’t go up there.”

“You can, and you’re going to.” Garamond put his arm around Aileen and was alarmed when she sagged against him with her full weight. He put his mouth close to her ear. “I can’t do this alone. I need your help to get Chris away from here.”

She straightened with difficulty. “I’ll try. Lots of women go to Terranova, don’t they?”

“That’s better.” Garamond gave her arm an encouraging squeeze and wondered if she really believed they could go to the one other human-inhabited Starflight-dominated world in the universe. “Now, we’re almost at the end of the tunnel When we get up the ramp, pick Chris up and walk straight on to the shuttle with him as if it was a school bus. I’ll be right behind you blocking the view of anybody who happens to be watching from the tower.”

“What will the other people say?” “There’ll be nobody else on the shuttle apart from the pilots, and I’ll talk to them.”

“But won’t the pilots object when they see us on board?”

“The pilots won’t say a word,” Garamond promised, slipping his hand inside his jacket.

At Starflight House, high on the sculpted hill, the first man had already died.

Domestic Supervisor Arthur Kemp had been planning his evening meal when the two spaniels bounded past him and darted into the shrubbery on the long terrace. He paused, eyed them curiously, then pushed the screen of foliage aside. The light was beginning to fail, and Kemp — who came from the comparatively uncrowded, unpolluted, unravaged north of Scotland — lacked Carlos Pennario’s sure instinct concerning matters of violent and premature death. He dragged Harald’s body into the open, stared for a long moment at the black deltas of blood which ran from nostrils and ears, and began to scream into his wrist communicator.

Elizabeth Lindstrom was on the terrace within two minutes.

She would not allow anybody to touch her son’s remains and, as the staff could not simply walk away, there formed a dense knot of people at the centre of which Elizabeth set up her court of enquiry. Standing over the small body, satin-covered abdomen glowing like a giant pearl, she spoke in a controlled manner at first. Only the Council members who knew her well understood the implications of the steadily rising inflexions in her voice, or of the way she had begun to finger a certain ruby ring on her right hand. These men, obliged by rank to remain close to the President, nevertheless tried to alter their positions subtly so that they were shielded by the bodies of other men, who in turn sensed their peril and acted accordingly. The result was that the circle around Elizabeth grew steadily larger and its surface tension increased.

It was into this arena of fear that Domestic Supervisor Kemp was thrust to give his testimony. He answered several of her questions with something approaching composure, but his voice faltered when — after he too had confirmed Captain Garamond’s abrupt departure from the terrace — Elizabeth began pulling out her own hair in slow, methodical handfuls. For an endless minute the soft ripping of her scalp was the only sound on the terrace.

Kemp endured it for as long as was humanly possible, then turned to run. Elizabeth exploded him with the laser burst from her ring, and was twisting blindly to hose the others with its fading energies when her senior physician, risking his own life, fired a cloud of sedative drugs into the distended veins of her neck. The President lost consciousness almost as once, but she had time to utter three words :

“Bring me Garamond.”