Stand on Zanzibar

context (13)

THE OLD NEWSPAPER

“BOY SHOOTS FIVE DEAD IN BEAUTY SCHOOL

“Mesa, Arizona, 12 November

“FIVE PEOPLE, including a mother and her three-year-old daughter, were shot dead today by a boy who forced them to lie down on the floor of a beauty school here.

“Two other victims—including the three-month-old baby of the dead mother—are in hospital.

“It was the third mass murder in the United States in four months. In August a sniper shot dead 15 people in Austin, Texas, and in July eight student nurses were strangled or knifed in Chicago.”

“THE LONGEST RISK YET IN SPACE

“by our Science Correspondent

“ASTRONAUT Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin opened the hatch of his Gemini-12 spacecraft yesterday and stood up in space. Two hours and 28 minutes later he withdrew, having set a record for direct exposure to the hazards of space.”

“NEW EINSTEINS FROM ‘CUTTINGS’

“by JOHN DAVY, our Science Correspondent

“IT MAY soon be possible to propagate people in much the same way as we now propagate roses—by taking the equivalent of cuttings.

“According to the Nobel prize–winning geneticist, Professor Joshua Lederberg, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we should consider the implications of this now, since it would offer the possibility of making dozens or hundreds of genetically identical individuals like multiplied identical twins …

“The techniques are likely to be tried ‘even without an adequate basis of understanding of human values, not to mention vast gaps in human genetics.’ This makes it essential to think out the implications beforehand, since otherwise policies are likely to be based on ‘the accidents of the first advertised samples.’ Public opinion might be determined by the nationality or public esteem of the cloned person, or ‘the handsomeness of para-human progeny.’

“The prediction and modification of human nature, the professor urges, badly need the planning and ‘informed foresight’ which we apply to other aspects of life.”

—Three adjacent news-stories from the front page of the London Observer, 13th November 1966

continuity (13)

MULTIPLY BY A MILLION

Riding home from Guinevere’s, Donald felt the Yatakangi claim oppressing his mind, a monstrous mattress of news. He hardly spoke to the others in the cab. He was half-dead from fatigue, having contrived only a couple of hours’ sleep before Delahanty broke in on his rest. Tiredness and the tranks he had taken had combined to mute his feelings all day long. He had not even been able to convert his fury at Schritt dogging him into decisive action.

Yet knowing he had let himself slide through his last day as a free agent before the maw of government engulfed him did not seem to disturb him unduly, and the reason why gradually emerged into awareness.

Yesterday, when he had left the Public Library after his stint of duty, the illusion had overtaken him that all the masses of New York were animate dolls, less than human, and he among them. Determined to prove he was not really inhabiting a hostile world, he had wandered from illusion into the harsh reality of a riot. A small one, granted—not like some that had taken place in Detroit, for example, with a death-toll in the hundreds—but final enough for the copter pilot who had been killed with clubs.

Suddenly, today, this was not the familiar world he had lived in for the past decade, but another plane of reality: a fearful one, like a jungle on an alien planet. The police captain had said that on present evidence it was a hundred per cent certain he would start a riot if he went for a harmless evening stroll. So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.

Caught like this, suspended between the wreck of former convictions and the solidification of new ones, he could no more have rebelled against the decision of the computer in Washington to activate him than he could have brought the dead pilot back to life.

Apathetically, not assigning meanings to the words, he heard Norman address Elihu.

“Did you put the scheme to GT today as you intended?”

“Yes.”

“And—?”

“Shalmaneser had already given them four possible reasons for my approaching them. This was the one he—I mean it—rated highest.” Elihu shuddered. “They had contingency plans prepared, trial budgets, even a tentative advertising programme. And they loved every moment while they were explaining how they’d pre-guessed me.”

“Their security must have been better than usual,” Norman said. “Not a word of it filtered through to me.”

“You referred to Shalmaneser as ‘he’,” Chad said. “Why?”

“The people at GT do it all the time,” Elihu muttered.

“Sounds as though he’s becoming one of the family. Norman, is there any truth in this propaganda about making Shalmaneser genuinely intelligent?”

Norman made a palm-up gesture to pantomime ignorance. “There’s a non-stop argument over whether his reactions are simple reflex any longer. But it’s out of my range, I’m afraid.”

“I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”

“When are they going to make the news public?” Norman inquired of Elihu.

“Not yet awhile. I insisted. I’m going back for further discussions tomorrow, and someone from State is supposed to join us—probably Raphael Corning, the synthesist. And you too, naturally, because I think you should make the first contact with Zadkiel on the company’s behalf.”

He concluded bitterly, “In view of what I’m wishing on them, though, I can’t help wondering if the Beninians will ever forgive me.”

It’ll be a relief to get away from here, Donald realised with amazement. Christ, I think I’d have been glad if they’d put me in jail this morning. I’d take a job on the moon, or at MAMP—anything, even in Yatakang—for the sake of being in a place that I expect to take me by surprise instead of my home city where things I thought were comfortable and ordinary got up and kicked me in the face.

* * *

When they entered the apt, Chad set off on a survey of the premises without asking permission, peering into each room in turn and shaking his head as though in wonderment. Over his shoulder he said, “Like coming back to a dream, know that? Like waking, and going back to sleep next night, and finding the dream’s been going on without you and here you are entering it at a later stage.”

“Do you think the kind of life you’ve been living the past few years is—is more real, then?” Elihu inquired. No one had invited him to sit down; because it was closest he took Norman’s favourite Hille chair and settled his bulk in it with much adjustment of his Beninian robe. He set aside his velvet-and-feathers headdress, rubbing the line it had indented across his forehead.

“More real? Sheeting hole, what a question! But the whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily. “To quote myself—the habit that persuaded me I ought to quit trying to influence people because I’d run out of new ways to express my ideas—where was I? Oh yes. The real world can take you by surprise, can’t it? We just saw it happen at Gwinnie’s party. The real world got up in the middle of the apt and did it ever shake the foundations of those people!”

Sober, Norman said, “What’s the effect going to be, do you think?”

“Christ, why do you have to treat me as a Shalmaneser-surrogate? That’s the trouble with you corporation zecks—you trade your faculty of independent judgment against a bag of cachet and a fat salary. Mind if I help myself to a drink?”

Norman started. He pointed mutely at the liquor console, but Chad was already there scanning the dials.

“I saw some of the effect right there at the party,” Donald said. He wanted to shiver, but the muscles of his back refused to respond to the urge. “There was a man—doesn’t matter who. I read his lips. He was saying something about a girl he’d lost because he wasn’t allowed to be a father.”

“You can multiply him by a million as a start,” Chad said, raising a whistler from the console’s outlet. “Maybe a lot more. Though that party was hardly a fair sample. The sort of people who go to such romps are on average too selfish to make parents.”

He poured the whistler down his throat in a single gulp, nodded approval at the impact it made, and dialled another.

“Just a second,” Elihu put in. “Mostly, people talk as though it’s the parents who are the selfish ones. And this alarms me. I mean, I can see how having three, four or more children could be regarded as selfish. But two, which only maintains a balance—”

“It’s classic economic jealousy,” Chad said with a shrug. “Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it. When I was a cub the basis for this resentment was relative intelligence. I recall some people back in Tulsa who spread slanderous gossip about my parents for no better reason than that my sister and I were way ahead of all the other pupils in our school. Now the scarcity item is prodgies themselves. So two things happen: people who’ve been barred by a eugenics board, feeling they’ve been unjustly deprived, hide their sour-grapes pose behind a mask of self-righteousness—and a lot of people who can’t face the responsibility of raising prodgies seize on this as an excuse to copy them.”

“I have a grown son,” Elihu said after a moment. “I expect to be a grandfather in a year or two. I haven’t felt this effect you’re talking about.”

“Nor have I, on the personal level, but that’s mainly because I don’t like to choose my friends among the kind of people who react that way. Mark you, I’m not much of a father except in the biological sense—my marriage caved in. Also my books act as a splendid surrogate for the basic function children perform for their parents.”

“Which is?” Norman demanded in a faintly hostile tone.

“Temporal extension of personal influence over the environment. Children are a pipeline into the posthumous future. So are books, works of art, notoriety and sundry other alternatives. But you can’t have a score of millions of frustrated parents using authorship to sublimate their problems. Who’d be their audience?”

“As far as I’m aware I have no desire for children,” Norman said challengingly. “Despite my religion! A lot of Aframs feel the way I do because our prodgies would be raised in what remains a foreign and intolerant setting!”

“Oh, someone like you acts as his own child-surrogate,” Chad grunted. “You’re too sheeting busy making yourself over in a preconceived image to want to spend time licking a cub into shape as well.”

Norman rose half out of his chair, an indignant retort on his lips. With it still unuttered he contrived to turn the movement into reaching for a reefer from the box on the nearest table.

He said, more to himself than the others, “Prophet’s beard, I hardly know who I am any more, so…”

Donald repressed an exclamation at hearing his own predicament so patly echoed. But before he could speak, Elihu had put another question to Chad.

“Granting you’re right, what’s going to happen if this breakthrough in Yatakang takes away the excuse for forbidding parenthood on eugenic grounds? I mean, if you can have a healthy, normal child even if genetically it isn’t yours, it’s one step closer to the natural process than adoption, and I know dozens of people who’ve adopted and been apparently quite satisfied.”

“Why don’t you ask Shalmaneser? Sorry, Elihu—didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that I really have decided to give up trying to keep track of the human race. Some of our behaviour is so unbelievably irrational…” Chad rubbed tired eyes with his knuckles. “Sorry,” he said again. “I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble. But if you want to know what an expert thinks, why don’t you ask Don, not me? You have a degree in biology or something, don’t you?” he concluded, addressing Donald directly.

“Yes, that’s right.” Donald licked his lips, resenting having been drawn into the conversation when all he wanted to do was sit and be miserable on his own. For the sake of politeness he tried to order his thoughts.

“Well … Well, there’s nothing radically new about the first half of the Yatakangi programme, if what the man at the party said was correct. The techniques for optimising your population by ensuring only children of good heredity get born have existed for decades—you could even say for centuries, because if all you want to do is select, you can do it by conventional breeding methods. But I assume they’re talking about something more ambitious. Even so, you can donate semen, you can reimplant an externally fertilised ovum if it’s the mother’s heredity that’s at fault rather than the father’s—the hole, that’s available as a commercial service right here in this country! It’s expensive, and sometimes it takes three or four attempts because the ovum is very fragile, but it’s been being done for years. And if you’re prepared to stand the cost of missing a dozen launch windows before the tectogeneticists achieve a viable nucleus, you can even have a parthenogenetic embryo—a clone, as they call it. There isn’t anything so new in this claim from Yatakang.”

There was a pause. Norman said at length, “But the second stage, the bit about deliberately modifying the children into supermen…?”

“Wait a minute,” Chad cut in. “Donald, you’re wrong. It seems to me there are two very new factors involved even before you get on to the point Norman just raised. First off, a scarcity product is suddenly not going to be scarce any more. You can’t carve up and distribute fair shares of the available healthy prodgies, though people have been trying to do exactly that, by forming these clubs you keep running into which give non-parents a night or two a week to look after other members’ prodgies. What’s the population of Yatakang, though—something over two hundred million isn’t it? There’s no question of scarcity if the government intends to carry out its promise on that scale.

“And the second new factor, which is even more important, is this: somebody else has got it first.”

He let the words lie heavy in the air like a haze of smoke for long seconds before he gulped the last of his drink and gave a sigh.

“Well, I’d better go find a hotel, I guess. If I’m coming back from the gutter to join the merrymaking on the eve of Ragnarök I might as well go the whole hog. Find myself an apt tomorrow, load it with all the goodies people go for nowadays … Anyone know a good interior decorator I could call up and tell to get on with the job without bothering me?”

“Where have you been living, then?” Norman demanded. “Oh—the hole. I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.”

“I haven’t been living anywhere. I’ve been sleeping on the street. Want to see my permit?” Chad reached inside his fancy-dress suit and produced his greasy billfold. “There!” he added, extracting a card. “This is to certify—etcetera. And the hole with it.”

He stuffed the billfold back in his pocket and tore the permit into four pieces.

The others exchanged glances. Elihu said, “I didn’t realise you’d carried your policy of opting out quite that far.”

“Opting out? There’s only one way to do that, the same as throughout history: you kill yourself. I thought I could resign from society. The hole I could! Man’s a gregarious animal—not very social, but damnably gregarious—and the mass simply won’t let the individual cut loose, even if the bonds are no more than police permits for sleeping rough. So I came back, and here I am in this idiotic outfit of grandfather’s clothes, and…”

He scowled and threw the scraps of card at a disposall. One of them missed and fluttered to rest on the carpet like a dying moth.

“I could fix you a room at the UN Hostel,” Elihu suggested. “The accommodation is basic, but it’s convenient and cheap.”

“Cheap doesn’t bother me. I’m a multimillionaire.”

“What?” Norman exclaimed.

“Sure—thanks to the bleeders who bought my books and refused to act on what I said in them. They’re set in college courses, they’re translated into forty-four languages … I’m going to spend some of this credit for a change!”

“Well, in that case…” Norman let the words die away.

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say you were welcome to spread your tatami here,” Norman explained. “Assuming Donald doesn’t mind. I don’t know how soon they’ll be sending me to Beninia, but I’m bound to be away a fairly long time. And—ah—I’d count it a privilege to have you as a guest.” He sounded uncomfortable.

“Chad can have my room as of tomorrow night,” Donald said, and thought too late of the shiny spike he had been shown, hidden under the Hille chair.

But the hole with that.

Norman turned to him incredulously. “What happened? What decided you to leave?”

“I’ve been told to,” Donald said.

What will they do to me for this? I don’t know. I don’t care.

He leaned his head back and sleep came while his eyelids were still sliding down.

tracking with closeups (13)

THE GOOSEBERRY BUSH

Fat, black-haired, slightly sallow, with a big red mouth and bright dark eyes, Olive Almeiro looked the very model of a peasant materfamilias, except that her arms were weighed down by bracelets of emeralds and diamonds. The image of motherhood was part of her stock-in-trade. In fact she had never even married, let alone borne children.

Nonetheless, she insisted on her staff calling her “señora” rather than “señorita”, and in a sense she was entitled to the aura of maternity. She had stood proxy-mother, so to speak, to more than two thousand adoptees.

They had provided her with her floating home, the yacht Santa Virgen (a name from which she derived wry amusement); with the office-building she owned and operated from; with an international reputation; with all the comfort she could buy and a second fortune in reserve to purchase more.

It was just as well they had done all this before today.

Her office, windowed on all four sides, was decorated with dolls from every period of history: ancient Egyptian clay animals, Amerind toys of knotted and coloured straw, carved wooden manikins from the Black Forest, velvet teddy-bears, Chinese figurines made from scraps of priceless silk …

Imprisoned behind glass, too precious to be touched by the fingers of a child.

She said to the phone, staring out across the blue morning waters of the ocean, “What’s it going to do to us?”

A distant voice said it was too soon to tell.

“Well, work it out and do it fast! As if the trouble we’re having with the dichromatism bit wasn’t enough, these bleeders in Yatakang have to—ah, never mind. I guess we could always move to Brazil!”

She cut the connection with a furious gesture and leaned back in her polychair, swivelling it so that instead of the calm blue sea she faced the teeming city on the landward side.

After a while she pressed an intercom switch. She said, “I’ve made up my mind. Unship the Lucayo twins and the Rosso boy that they sent from Port-au-Prince. Before we dispose of them they’ll eat as much as we can make in profits.”

“What do you want us to do with them then, señora?” asked the voice from the intercom.

“Leave ’em on the steps of the cathedral—put ’em out to sea in a basket—why should I have to tell you what to do, so long as you unship them?”

“But, señora—”

“Do as I say or you’ll be out to sea in a basket yourself.”

“Very well, señora. It’s only that there’s this Yanqui couple who want to see you, and I thought perhaps…”

“Oh yes. Tell me about them.”

She listened, and within the minute had summed them up. Doubtless having given up everything at home—their jobs, their apt, their friends—for the sake of a legal conception in Puerto Rico, they had been cornered by the J-but-O State’s unexpected ratification of the dichromatism law and were now driven back to considering adoption, which they could have arranged without leaving the mainland.

I’m sick of them. The brown-noses are the worst, lording it over us spics when our ancestors came here as conquerors and theirs came as slaves, but just about any Yanqui gives me morning-sickness.

The silent joke lightened her mood enough to permit her to say, “All right, send them in. And what did you say was the name?”

“Potter,” said the intercom.

They came in holding hands, and stared at her covertly while settling in the chairs she waved them to. One could almost hear the mental comment: “so this is the famous Olive Almeiro!” After a while, the wife’s attention wandered to the display of dolls, and the husband cleared his throat.

“Señora Almeiro, we—”

“You got caught with your pants down,” Olive cut in.

Frank Potter blinked. “I don’t quite—”

“You don’t imagine you’re unique, do you? What’s your trouble—colour-blindness?”

“That’s right. And my wife is sure to pass it on, so—”

“So you decided to migrate and because Nevada is expensive and Louisiana doesn’t like being used as a conception refuge you chose Puerto Rico and the legislature shot your ship out from under. What do you want me to do about it?”

Taken aback by the baby-farmer’s curtness, Frank exchanged glances with his wife, who was very pale.

“It was on the spur of the moment,” he admitted. “We thought you might be in a position to help us.”

“To adopt? I doubt it. If you are willing to consider adoption you need have moved no further from New York than New Jersey.” Olive fingered her jowl. “You probably want me to disguise a child of your own as an adoptee. It’s already on the way, isn’t it?”

Frank flushed to the roots of his hair. He said, “How could you possibly—?”

“I told you you’re not unique. Was it intentional?”

“I guess so.” He stared at the floor, miserably. “We decided to celebrate our decision to move, you see. But we didn’t realise it had happened so quickly. We didn’t find out until we’d arrived here.”

“They didn’t spot it at Immigration? No, come to think of it, they only check women arriving from abroad and from the maverick states. In that case you’re already in a cleft stick. Either the prodgy was conceived in New York State where you’d been specifically forbidden to start one, or it was conceived here where transmission of your genes is now illegal, or between the two which makes it a prohibited immigrant the moment it leaves the womb. So…?”

“We thought maybe if we went out of the country altogether,” Sheena whispered.

“And got me to adopt it back in, and reunite you with it?” Olive gave a humourless chuckle. “Yes, I do that sort of thing. For a flat fee of a hundred thousand.”

Frank started. “But that’s far more than—!”

“Than the cost of a regular adoption? Certainly. Adoption is legal, subject to certain conditions. What you’re proposing is not.”

There was silence. Eventually Olive said, having savoured their discomfort, “Well, Mr. Potter, I’d suggest the only solution for you is to start over. I can recommend GT’s line of abortifacients, and I know a doctor who won’t insist on the kind of pregnancy check he’s supposed to carry out before prescribing them. Then I could put you on my regular waiting list. Beyond that I can’t be any help.”

“There must be something else we can do!” Frank almost jumped out of his chair. “We want our own prodgies, not someone else’s second-hand! Over in Yatakang they’ve just announced they can—”

Olive’s face went as hard as marble. She said, “You will oblige me by leaving, Mr. Potter.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” A podgy hand stabbed a button on her desk.

Sheena plucked at her husband’s arm. “She’s an expert, Frank,” she said in a dead voice. “You’ve got to take her word for it.”

“No, this is too much! We came in to make a civil inquiry and—”

“The door behind you is open,” Olive said. “Good morning.”

Sheena turned and headed for the exit. After a moment in which he looked ready to scream with fury, Frank let his shoulders droop and followed her.

* * *

When they had gone, Olive found herself panting from the effort of self-control. She pronounced a curse on the government of Yatakang and felt a little better.

But her hatred was new and raw; like a dressed burn it hurt despite salving.

Over the years she had built up a huge network of necessary contacts, expended a million dollars in bribes, risked prosecution a score of times, secure in the belief that products of contemporary tectogenetic skill such as cloned embryos could never compete with traditional “unskilled labour”. She had begun when only two states, California and New York, had eugenic legislation, and Puerto Rico was full of overburdened mothers with passable genotypes prepared to let a fifth or sixth baby go for adoption to some rich Yanqui. As the eugenics laws spread and grew teeth, as voluntary sterilisation after the third child became commonplace, she developed alternatives. A clean genotype, while still desirable, posed less of a problem than proving the adoptee was an American citizen when for brown-nose parents-to-be it hailed from Haiti, for gringos from Chile or Bolivia.

With much trouble and care she had mothered an enterprise that coped with all the difficulties. Now, suddenly, the sheeting Yatakangis had laid a long black shadow of disaster half around the world. They were not merely offering for free a chance hitherto denied to all but the richest families—they were intending to insist on it. The child born of any womb could be a genius, a Venus, an Adonis …

And if their further claim was true, who would want a run-of-the-mill child when there were going to be improved versions with unguessable new talents?

From her desk she picked up its only ornament, a conch-shell of exceptionally vivid colouring, and threw it at the window overlooking the busy city. It fell in pieces to the floor. The glass was unmarked, and the universe outside was still there.

continuity (14)

THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

There was no longer a real world. It receded from him like the half-grasped images of a dream: epitome of the uncertainty principle, torn asunder by the effort of clutching them. It was already hazy when he committed himself to the East River acceleratube, and the last shreds dissipated behind the plane which arced him across the continent on the fringe of empty space, where the stars might be like white-hot needles if they could be seen.

They were, of course, not seen. Through radiation shielding and crash protection and layers of heat insulation that at re-entry glowed (by report) dull red, the stars could not penetrate to the eyes of Donald Hogan.

He thought of Chad Mulligan asking when last he saw the stars—asking when Norman last got wet in the rain—fading, illusory, spawn of a drug. A woman in the next seat spent the journey chuckling to herself, making a wholly personal trip, and he sometimes caught a sweetish whiff of something she had in a smelling-bottle with a foam wad closing the neck. He thought at one point she was going to offer it to him, but she changed her mind.

Why kill a man you’ve never seen before? The pilot of the shot-down copter, whose skull the crowd had smashed, seemed more real to him than Norman, than Chad, than anyone. The abstract truth of that death grew solid in his mind, making him think of Haldane’s argument that an intelligent bee would conceive ideas like “duty” to be concrete.

If they wished to, legally they could put a weapon in his hand and tell him to go across the Pacific Conflict Zone to kill strangers. They did it daily to hundreds of young men picked by an anonymous computer. The New York rioters had been armed, too, and that was called crime. Between that act and this ran only the tenuous dividing line called an order.

From whom? In these days, from a man? Probably not. His illusion on Fifth Avenue outside the library, therefore, was not illusion. First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then…?

Then you serve machines. It was obvious. It followed so logically it was almost comforting. And Guinevere was right after all to make the clients of her Beautiques into glossy factory products.

It was even clear why people, including Donald Hogan, were willing to accept the instructions of a machine. Many others besides himself must have discovered that serving human beings felt like treachery—like selling out to the enemy. Every man and woman was the enemy. Biding their time, perhaps, masking their intentions with fine polite words, but in the end clubbing to death you, a stranger on their own home street.

* * *

They opened the can-container of the plane and spilled the passengers like pilchards into the warm hesitant sun of early Californian summer. The expressport was featureless, like an aircraft carrier, its passenger terminal and service depots sheltered by a thickness of earth from the risk of a crash and an explosion. Accordingly what he saw of the sunlight was through armour-glass, and he did not smell the salt air off the ocean but the perfumed exhaust of the conditioning system. The burrow-like passages divided him from the last vestiges of the world he had left on the other coast, seeming to force his thinking into an analogue of their uncompromising square section with sharp right angles where they joined. Everything seemed new and improbable, as though he were under a drug that destroyed perceptual sets. The spectacle of so many men and women in uniform was a source of wonder: the olive-drab of Army, the dark blue of Navy, the light blue of Air, the black and white of Space. The PA system uttered cryptic orders full of numerical and lettered codes until in addition to visual confusion he began to lose control over his auditory faculties, imagining that he was in a country he had never heard of where they spoke the staccato language of machines: 01101000101 …

A clock told him what time it was and his watch assured him the clock was a liar. Posters warned him about danger from spies and he began to be afraid of himself because he was a spy. A rope fence hung on coloured metal poles isolating a branch corridor down which char-marks and bright scratches suggested an explosion. An unknown hand had chalked on the wall DREKY REDS. A man went by holding his head consciously high: eyes aslant, complexion marginally yellow, a Nisei badge pinned to his shirjack seeming like the flimsiest of armour. More uniforms, this time the blue and black of police, scrutinising everyone. On galleries there were zoom TV cameras and a team of four men were collecting all the fingerprints that accumulated on the escalator handrails and taking them to a computer readin to be checked against headquarters files. ASK THE MAN WHO’S MARRIED TO MARY JANE.

But STOMP THAT ROACH.

“Lieutenant Hogan?” a voice said. TUNE IN AND TURN ON TO THE WORLD IN A RADIO-DRESSLET.

But KEEP THE WORLD AT BAY THROUGH SAFE-T-GARD INC.

“Lieutenant Hogan!” HERE TODAY AND GONE TODAY IS THE PIDGIN WE PLUCK.

But SEE IT THROUGH THE EVERYWHERES’ EYES …

He wondered if Sergeant Schritt was supposed to have been on his plane; he wondered if the man had managed to get as drunk as he wanted; he wondered if oblivion had brought surcease. That was the last and final courtesy he paid to the dead alien world of the past decade. It was out of reach now, receding along the fourth dimension at the speed of light. It had been his, private, like the illusions of a hitripper, and as Chad had promised the real world had reserved its unique power to take him by surprise.

He said, listening with interest to the disbelief in his voice, “Yes, I’m Hogan. Were you sent to meet me and take me to Boat Camp?”

* * *

Among the dead-whale hulls of military craft soiling the once-fine beaches, the incongruously small, incongruously bright and incongruously noisy cockleshell of a cushioncraft ferried him and his anonymous companion over the rolling inshore surf towards the Devil’s Island bulk of Boat Camp on the skyline. Clambering among the struts supporting the vast main platform as though preparing to return to the simpler and less dangerous universe of the race’s monkey ancestors, recruits in full combat gear struggled to evade their sergeant’s wrath.

* * *

“I sent to Washington to have you re-evaluated,” said the colonel he was brought to see. “It’s something I’d have thought they’d make sure you appreciated before recruiting you, let alone activating you—that no individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative. However, I see your special aptitude is pattiducking, so you have a marginal chance of being right more often than most people. Don’t do it again, is all.”

“My special aptitude is what—sir?”

“Pattiducking! Pattern generation by deductive and inductive reasoning!” The colonel pushed his fingers through his hair in a combing movement.

Another barrier went up between Donald and the man he had believed himself to be. It made no real difference—the past was already out of reach. But he had always cherished that talent as something particularly his own, and in a ghostly fashion he was hurt to find it was well enough known to have a nickname.

“What is it I’m not supposed to do again, sir?” he demanded.

“Jump to conclusions, of course!” the colonel rapped. “I guess you decided it was a foregone conclusion that your mission was connected with this new genetics programme, but you sheeting well shouldn’t have pre-guessed an official decision to shed the cover Delahanty gave you.”

Shed?… Oh. He means tell Norman and the others that I’d been instructed to leave New York.

Donald shrugged and remained silent.

“You have your sealed orders with you?” the colonel asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Give them here.”

Donald handed over the package. The colonel scanned the documents it contained and placed them in a chute alongside his desk labelled Destruct Secret Material. Pressing a button, he sighed.

“I don’t yet have the full details of your revised cover,” he said. “As I understand it, though, the official announcement from Yatakang means that more foreign visitors than usual can be fed into the country convincingly by the regular channels. You’ll find them a sight easier than the irregular ones.” His eyes wandered to the office’s single window, which overlooked a parade-floor where a group of raw draftees were doubling to and fro.

“Broadly, at all events, you’re to be sent in openly as a freelance scientific reporter accredited to SCANALYZER and Engrelay Satelserv. It’s perfectly authentic, and before you raise the point I’ll say that your lack of experience is of no consequence. You need only ask the kind of questions legitimate journalists will be asking about the eugenics programme. You’ll be given a certain amount of additional information, however. Most importantly, you will be the only foreign reporter in Yatakang with facilities for contacting Jogajong.”

Donald stiffened and his scalp began to crawl.

I didn’t know he was back there! If he’s what they claim him to be I’m liable to walk into a civil war!

Mistaking Donald’s dismay for incomprehension, the colonel rasped, “Don’t you know who I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Donald muttered. Nobody who had had to learn contemporary idiomatic Yatakangi could have avoided mention of Jogajong. Jailed four times by the Solukarta government, banned titular head of the Yatakangi Freedom Party, leader of an abortive revolt after which he had had to flee the country, author of books and pamphlets which still circulated despite police seizures and public burnings …

“Any questions?” the colonel said suddenly, sounding bored.

“Yes, sir. Several.”

“Hah! Very well, let’s hear them. But I warn you, I’ve told you as much as you’re supposed to know at this stage.”

That disposed of about four questions immediately. Donald hesitated.

“Sir, if I’m going to be sent openly to Yatakang, why was I told to come to Boat Camp? Won’t they be suspicious if they find out I’ve been at a military establishment?”

The colonel thought that over. He said at length, “I believe that’s answerable on current terms of reference. It’s a question of security. Boat Camp is secure. Land-based installations often aren’t. Come to think of it, I’ll tell you an educational story which may drive home what you’re up against.

“A certain base on shore was overlooked from a hillside which was good for flying kites. One boy about fourteen or fifteen used to go up there to fly a specially fine box-kite he’d built himself, about five feet high. And he’d been doing this daily for two mortal months before one of the base officers wondered how come he never spent his vacation from school doing anything but play with a kite. He went up and on the end of that kite’s cord he found a recorder, and on the kite itself a miniature TV camera. And this kid—no more than fifteen, mind—threw a knife, took him in the thigh, and tried to strangle him. Point made?”

Donald agreed with a slight shudder.

“And there’s a further reason, of course. It’s the best place to eptify you for your mission.”

“Major Delahanty told me about that,” Donald said slowly. “It’s still not quite clear to me.”

“Eptification is derived from an acronym—EPT stands for ‘education for particular tasks’. Most softasses don’t take the idea seriously. To them it’s just one more among a horde of commercial panaceas which conmen are using to part the marks from their money. And that’s partly true, of course, because to use the technique properly you more or less have to have had it done to you, and we don’t turn many people we’ve done it to back into civilian life.”

“You mean that afterwards I’m not going to—?”

“I’m not talking about you specifically,” the colonel cut in. “I’m saying that in principle there’s not much application for it outside the service!”

“But if I’m going to be required to pose as a reporter—”

“What’s that got to do with it? You only need to feed back facts. They’ll be monitored and edited in this country. Engrelay Satelserv has a staff of experts to look after that end of the problem.”

Confused, Donald said, “I seem to have missed the point somewhere. When you said lack of experience as a reporter didn’t matter, I naturally assumed…”

He broke off. The colonel was regarding him with mingled amusement and contempt.

“Yes, you do make a lot of assumptions, don’t you? We’re not in business to provide the beam agencies with star talent, though—as you’d have figured out if you’d stopped to think! Anyhow, that’s not what you need eptification in.”

“What, then?”

“In four short days,” the colonel said, “you’re going to be eptified to kill.”

tracking with closeups (14)

LIGHT THE TOUCHPAPER AND RETIRE

There were still a few openings left for one-man businesses even in this age of automation, computers and the grand cartel. Jeff Young had found one.

Whistling, he limped down the narrow alley between two rows of tape-controlled machine-tools, a lean man in his early forties with receding dark hair and heavy rings under his eyes suggesting a slight, not socially reprehensible habit—possibly a stimulant like Procrozol with a strong insomniac side-effect. He did in fact get less sleep than most people; furthermore he acted as though he was always a trifle pepped. But it wasn’t due to any kind of drug.

He carried a small plastic sack. At one of the whining lathes he halted and set the neck of the sack against the swarf-hopper. From it he spilled half a pound of fine magnesium chips and curls.

Then he crossed to a sander which was buffing the grey surface of a piece of cast iron into mirror smoothness and added a dredging of iron filings.

Still whistling, he hobbled out of the machine-shop and closed the doors. The lighting went off automatically—tape-controls didn’t need to see what they were doing.

The only other member of his staff, a shiggy who sometimes struck customers as too stupid even to act as mouthpiece for a gang of lathes and mills, had already left the front office for home. Nonetheless he called her name and listened for a reply before approaching a row of shallow aquaria ranged along the room’s rear wall. Small bright fish gazed uncomprehendingly as he dipped a hook into the water of each in turn and withdrew from concealment in the fine white sand at the bottom a series of plastic globes half-full of something cloudy and brown.

Satisfied, he replaced the globes, set the burglar alarms, and turned on the lumino sign identifying this as the home of Jeff Young Custom Metalwork—Functional and Artistic Designs Executed.

The sack dangling from his fingers, he locked up and headed for the rapitrans.

* * *

Having eaten a leisurely meal watching his new but not ostentatiously expensive holographic TV, he left home again at eleven-ten poppa-momma, carrying the sack in a small black satchel. He took the rapitrans to a station where very few people stopped after sunset, a beach stop favoured by sunners and surfers, isolated between the sprawling tentacles of the city because here the ground was too weak to bear the weight of buildings of economic height. He had established the habit of a nightly constitutional along the beach over several years. It was one of the things that kept his sleeping-time down.

He wandered at a leisurely pace until he was out of sight of the rapitrans. Then, with sudden swift purpose, he dodged into the total shadow of some ornamental bushes and opened the satchel. From it he withdrew a mesh mask and put it on. Then he sprayed the plastic sack with an aerosol which would destroy both the greasy trace of fingerprints and the giveaway epidermal cells which might have rubbed off on it.

Finally he took out a bolt-gun—legitimately owned, licensed by the fuzzy-wuzzies as suitable for a man owning a valuable machine-shop—and moved on along the beach.

He came to the prearranged rendezvous and stopped, checking his watch. He was two minutes early. Shrugging, he stood in silence, and waited.

Shortly a voice addressed him out of the darkness. It said, “Over here—this way.”

He turned towards the sound. The voice had been male, but beyond that he could tell nothing about the owner. Dealing with partisans, that was the way he preferred things to be. Almost certainly he was in the field of a black-light projector, so he acted as though the invisible speaker could watch every movement he made.

With his gun he indicated a point on the sand near his feet. A small package arced through the air and landed with a thud. Dropping on one knee, putting down the satchel but not the gun, he felt its contents and gave a nod. He exchanged the package for the plastic sack, rose, and took a couple of paces backward. By now his vision had adjusted fully to the dimness, and he could see that the person who emerged from shadow to collect the sack was not the one who had spoken, but a shiggy, probably young, certainly with a good figure.

Bending—slowly, so as not to alarm the man waiting in the background—he selected a stick and with it wrote upside-down words on the sand.

WHAT FOR?

A muted chuckle. The man said, “It’ll be in the news tomorrow.”

THINK I’D SELL YOU OUT?

“I’ve stayed free for eighteen months,” the man said. “It wasn’t by advertising my movements.”

ME—8 YEARS.

By now the shiggy had withdrawn to the company of her man. He scuffed over what he had written with his bad foot, and substituted GT ALUMINOPHAGE.

“You’ve got that?” the partisan said, startled.

BREEDING NOW.

“How much?”

CHEAP. TELL ME WHAT THERMITE FOR.

Then he crossed that through, and wrote EXPENSIVE.

“I catch. Name some figures.”

Once more he scuffed over the letters.

$150 PER 1000. BREED 1,000,000—6 DAYS.

“Are they as good as GT claims?”

12 HR BROKE INCH MONOFILAMENT ROPE.

“Christ! That’s the stuff they hang suspension bridges on!”

RIGHT.

Scuffed over again. Expectant waiting.

“We could use that,” the man said finally. “Okay, I’ll gamble. We’re going to put out the Bay Bridge rapitrans.”

TRACK WELL GUARDED.

“We’re not going to put it on the track. There’s a stretch where the vacuum parcels tube parallels the monorail. If we time it right it should melt through and short the power cables.”

PHOS-ACID IGNITER?

“No, we have a timer with an HT arc.”

NOT MINE.

Another chuckle, this one with a wry inflection. “Thanks, when I can afford your standards I’ll send to Switzerland. Okay, I’ll let you know when we need the aluminophage.”

NIGHT.

“Good night.”

From the direction of the voice there came soft scuffling sounds. He waited till they were over, then found a bit of flotsam and stirred up the sand where he had written his part of the conversation.

He turned for home with as brisk a step as his short leg allowed, leaving the last of his footprints to be wiped out by the night’s tide.

* * *

Instead of going to bed in his apt, he did as he often did on fine nights and carried an inflatable mattress up to the roof of the block. He also took a pair of binocs, but these were well concealed inside the mattress-roll.

A boy and a shiggy were enjoying themselves up there when he arrived, but that was a customary hazard. He would have plenty of privacy where he wanted to be, on the far side of the ventilator stacks. Contentedly he spread the mattress, calculating in his head how long to wait before beginning his watch. He estimated an hour, and that was close. It was sixty-six minutes before a brilliant glow bulged and dripped through the Bay Bridge parcels tube and sagged sections of it into contact with the monorail power leads.

He gave a nod of professional approval. That little lot would take all night to sort out. Not bad for amateurs, not bad at all. Though when he expanded his services to handle the requirements of partisans as well as ordinary hobby-type saboteurs, he had hoped they’d target on something more ambitious. Nuisance-value was all right in its place, but …

It wasn’t that he shared the partisans’ political convictions. He was neither a nihilist nor a little red brother, which were the two polar-opposed factions that kept them as busy quarrelling among themselves as attacking the established society around them. There was simply no other outlet for his greatest talent. The army had eptified him as a saboteur, and after the incident which bequeathed him his bad leg they had refused to re-enlist him.

What else can a hungry man do but eat the food he finds in front of him?

They hadn’t yet had the presence of mind to cut the power feeding the shorted cables on the bridge, and the display of sparks was making the struts and girders glow like the pillars of hell. Jeff Young felt the heat of the thermite bomb seem to penetrate his belly and move downwards, and with the hand not holding his binocs he began rhythmically to afford himself relief from it.

continuity (15)

DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT

Some corporations still maintained the traditional table for meetings of the board. Not GT, a modern product. The boardroom on the presidential floor of the tower was a place of soft pearly lights under an arched ceiling, punctuated by thrones consisting in a comfortable padded seat surrounded with electronic equipment. Every place had a holographic projection screen, a sound-recorder, a computer readout, and phones giving direct access to any of GT’s forty-eight subsidiary plants and better than nine hundred local offices in fifteen countries, some of them by satellite relay.

The thrones for the officers were upholstered in genuine leather, those for senior VP’s in woven fabric, and those for junior VP’s and specialist staffers called in to give advice in resilient plastic. Two extra thrones in leather had been installed today, one for Elihu Masters—one could hardly accord less to an ambassador—the other for the scarecrow-gaunt synthesist from State whom Norman had met during their preliminary discussions, Dr. Raphael Corning. It was the first time Norman had had to work in direct co-operation with a synthesist, and the man’s range of immediately available knowledge had depressed him, making him feel he had wasted the whole of his earlier life.

But that was not the only thing which was bringing him down. He felt hollow, as though he was about to crumple under intolerable strain. On all previous occasions since he was promoted to board status he had relished the fact that he was the only Afram who attended these meetings and looked forward to the day when he would inherit first a fabric-, then a leather-covered throne. Accident had kicked him ahead of his plans. The whole Beninian venture would turn on him as a pivot, regardless of what rank they officially allotted him.

He looked at the pale palms of his hands and wondered how heavy the future of an entire country might weigh.

At intervals he uttered a mechanical hullo.

* * *

Sharp on time Old GT herself came in, attended as usual by a secretary who was human but so strung about with portable equipment as to make him effectively an extension of the corporation’s massive information-processing resources up to and including Shalmaneser. Behind there followed Hamilcar Waterford, the treasurer, and just after him E. Prosper Rankin, the company secretary. As they took their seats a taut silence filled the room.

“This extraordinary meeting of the board,” Old GT began without ado, “has been called to receive and vote on a special report from the vice-president in charge of projects and planning. Two non-members of the board are also present: Mr. Elihu Masters, U. S. Ambassador to Beninia, and Dr. Raphael Corning of the State Department. Those in favour of their continuing presence—?”

Norman fumbled for the “aye” button on his throne. On the front panel of Old GT’s a pattern of lights, all green, displayed the result of the vote.

“Thank you. Rex, will you introduce the report?”

Old GT sat back and crossed her arms on her bosom. For the first time he could recall, Norman decided that her manner was smug. And then he wondered whether he could have avoided acting the same way if he had had the vision and persistence to achieve such tremendous personal power.

There are odds against Aframs, but there are odds against women too, and they’re a bigger minority group than we are!

Rex Foster-Stern cleared his throat. “Background,” he said. “Beninia faces a crisis on the impending retirement of President Zadkiel Obomi. On his demise or vacation of his post two consequences are possible. A civil conflict over the succession is the less likely in view of the exceptionally peaceful course of events there since independence. The probabilities are weighted in favour of its powerful African neighbours attempting to annex its territory. Intervention by a third party may prevent this by providing them with a common target for recriminations, and State wishes to try this.

“A parallel situation arose when the Sulu Archipelago seceded from the Philippine Republic. As you know, the solution of integrating those islands into our country as the State of Isola did not lead to the desired result, pacification of the area. Moreover in the case of Isola the conflicting parties included an enemy acceptable to public opinion, the Chinese. As neither the Dahomalians nor the RUNGs are a military threat to us intervention on the Isolan pattern would be resented as an unnecessary waste of our resources.

“However, Ambassador Masters has hit on a feasible alternative: to integrate Beninia not into our national but into our commercial orbit, and this is the proposal we are going to ask you to approve today.

“Beninia offers a source of inexpensive and potentially skilled labour admirably sited for expansion into the hinterland. What is more, it’s equally well located to process raw materials derived from the so-far unexploited mineral deposits discovered by MAMP.

“You will have seen from our briefing summary that the predicted turnover of this operation is comparable to that of a national budget and the scheme will not be completed until 2060. Despite the scale of it, however, evaluation of even the most minor details has proved to be possible and all information in your briefing has been thoroughly explored by Shalmaneser as a hypothetical case. Without his favourable verdict we’d not have presented the report.”

“Thank you, Rex,” Old GT said. “I see question lights going on in several places—kindly wait until we’ve heard from Dr. Corning and Mr. Masters. Dr. Corning?”

The gaunt tall man leaned forward.

“I need only add minor glosses to the admirable document Mr. Foster-Stern has circulated,” he said. “First, as to State’s involvement. Although we don’t possess the unique Shalmaneser we’re not ill-equipped with computers and we analysed Mr. Masters’s suggestion very fully before okaying his approach to you. State’s prepared to buy a fifty-one per cent share in the loan floated to finance the project, but to minimise political repercussions we’ll have to do so through front agents. These should keep down complaints about neocolonialism so that by the ten-year mark we can hope for active co-operation from Beninia’s neighbours in digesting the fruits of the plan. And, second, I’d like to emphasise that Mr. Masters conceived his idea after very wide experience in the country and you should give great weight to his personal recommendation.”

“Mr. Masters?” Old GT invited.

“All right, I’ll make it personal, then,” Elihu said after a barely noticeable hesitation. “The reason I put this project to State has nothing to do with the profit your corporation can expect. If you’re at all acquainted with the recent history of Africa you’ll have noticed that the withdrawal of the colonial powers left the map in a terrible muddle. Arbitrary lines separated potential economic units—they weren’t even tribally based, but dictated by nineteenth-century European power-struggles. As a result, many countries have been in chaos. There have been civil wars, hordes of refugees, poverty, famine and pestilence.

“Since the idea of federation took hold, things have improved. Countries like Dahomalia, for instance, or the Republican Union of Nigeria with Ghana, have become reasonable places to live, with an adequate GNP and stable public services. But they didn’t settle down in Dahomalia until they’d killed about twenty thousand members of a dissident tribe, and as for what went on in South Africa—ah, never mind. Everyone knows what a living hell that was.

“In the middle of all this, my good friend Zad Obomi has performed the miracle of creating the equivalent of an African Switzerland, free from alliances that might drag it into wars it didn’t care about, as happened to Sierra Leone and Gambia; not being milked of irreplaceable resources by a richer foreign ally, as happened to the Congo—and so forth.

“Beninia’s a poverty-stricken country, but it’s a wonderful place to live. About five per cent of its people fled there from tribal clashes on adjacent territory, but there’s been no tribal violence in Beninia. There are four language-groups, but there’s been no conflict such as we’ve seen right close to home in Canada, or in Belgium prior to partition. It’s a peaceful country, and it seems to me it’s got something too valuable to be swallowed up by greedy neighbours merely because President Obomi can’t live forever.”

He fell silent. Glancing around at his colleagues, Norman detected expressions of puzzlement, and his heart sank.

Old GT coughed politely. She said, “I hardly need point out the relevance of what Mr. Masters has told us. An access point to the developing African market which is free of civil commotion and the other hazards of an African beach-head is quite remarkable, isn’t it?”

Norman saw the puzzled looks disappear, and felt a stir of honest admiration at Old GT’s ingenuity in manipulating her staffers.

“Next,” GT continued, “I call on Norman House, whom Mr. Masters personally recommends to initiate our negotiations with the Beninian government. Norman?”

The big moment was here. For a terrible pulsebeat-long span of time he felt panic, as though amnesia had wiped away everything he had carefully rehearsed to say. The sensation, however, passed so rapidly that he was already speaking before he realised he had recovered.

He said, “Thank you, GT,” and noticed the rustle of reaction. Traditionally, junior VP’s said “Miss Buckfast” or—by analogy with the form of address to the British Queen—“ma’am”. Several eyebrows were raised to signal recognition of impending promotion. Norman was too preoccupied to care. He had expended infinite pains on sounding out his colleagues, trying to judge the approach that would most impress them, and Rex had put a computer at his disposal to evaluate the various possibilities in terms of their personality-profiles; an instant of inattention could waste all that trouble.

“Mr. Masters has drawn our attention to a remarkable aspect of the history of Beninia, which I’d like to amplify. The legacy of colonialism there was seemingly a pleasant one. Beninia never underwent—even in the crisis years of the 1980s—agitation to expel foreigners, let alone massacres of them. Beninians seem self-confident enough to treat with anyone on terms they find acceptable. They know they need aid. They won’t reject an offer because it comes from—say—Britain, the former colonial power, or from ourselves just because this is primarily a white-skinned country. And so on.

“A feature common in the rest of Africa—greed for what richer countries can afford to give them combined with resentment of foreigners—this is absent in Beninia. This implies the solution to a major subsidiary problem posed by the project we’re considering.

“No doubt some of you are saying, ‘What experience do we have to draw on? As a country whose very formation was predicated on rejection of overseas interference, how are we going to cope with running the internal affairs of another country on another continent?’

“A very fair question—with a ready-made answer. A fund of experience exists for us to draw on, mainly in Britain but also in France. In both places there are a large number of talented executives who used to work in colonial administration and who are now marking time in other fields. Our investigations have proved that many of them would be willing to go back as advisors—I stress that, not as zecks or officials, merely as expert advisors.

“Additionally, you’ll all remember the much-lamented Peace Corps which was discontinued in 1989 as a result of the wave of xenophobia then engulfing Africa and Asia. Disillusioned, Congress abolished it as not justifying its by then colossal cost. If any of you come much into contact with young people, though, you’ll be aware that its legend survives. Working for the OAS in Chile or Bolivia is a serviceable substitute, but it doesn’t provide an adequate outlet for the available volunteers. We can pick and choose among tens of thousands of adventurous young people to staff—especially—our educational programme in Beninia.

“Financing of the project is assured. Raw materials for it are assured. As I think I’ve just shown, staffing for it is assured. I strongly urge adoption of the report.”

When he ceased he was astonished to find his heart hammering, his skin moist with perspiration.

Why, he realised with vague dismay, I’m really desperate to get this through. If they turn it down, what then?

Quit. Go to Yatakang with Donald Hogan. Anything except continue in GT. The idea was unthinkable.

He barely heard the expositions that followed his: the treasurer’s report from Hamilcar Waterford, a market preview, a psychological analysis of the major stock-holders suggesting a probable sixty-five per cent majority at a general meeting. He tuned in again on the questions, for these would foreshadow the decision of the board.

“I’d like to ask Dr. Corning why State approved Mr. Master’s approach to us, instead of setting up a consortium themselves.” That was Paula Phipps, the rather masculine senior VP in charge of commercial organics.

“The plan stands or falls on the question of raw materials,” Corning said shortly. “And no one but GT has MAMP.”

“Did the psychological analysis of our stock-holders take into account the fact that four-fifths of them are white and may object to spending so much in a black country when return on the investment will be deferred for several years?” That was Macy O’Toole, junior VP in charge of procurement, with a half-scowl at Norman.

“Return on the investment will not be deferred,” said Hamilcar Waterford. “Macy, you haven’t been listening!” A fierce snub; Norman started, because it implied that Waterford was firmly on the side of the ayes. “The anticipated proceeds from proper dredging of Port Mey, which will attract cargo that currently goes to other less favourably situated ports, are ear-marked for immediate dividends. Take another look at your briefing document, hm?”

There was a pause, no one else being eager to risk the officers’ displeasure. Old GT said, “Anyone got another question?”

Nora Reuben, senior VP in charge of electronics and communications, spoke up. “Why isn’t there a representative of the Beninian government here? I feel I’m operating in a vacuum.”

Good question. In fact, Norman decided, the only good one so far. GT was inviting Dr. Corning to handle it.

“Mr. Masters is the right person to answer this,” Corning countered, and all eyes turned to Elihu.

“Once more,” the latter said, “I have to speak more personally than you would perhaps expect. Some of you may recall the speculation that ensued when I was posted to Port Mey instead of the places that were being canvassed for me, which included Manila and Delhi. The reason I went to Beninia is simple, though. I wanted the post. Zad Obomi is a long-time friend of mine; we first met at the UN when I was attached to the American delegation as special counsellor on ex-colonial territories. When my predecessor at Port Mey retired, Zad asked for me and I accepted. He has only ever asked me one other favour, and that was very recently.

“Zad is now seventy-four years old. He’s an exhausted man. As you know, he was half-blinded in an assassination attempt, and the consequences have been psychological as well as physical.

“And a few weeks ago, he called me to his office and said this to me—I’ll try and quote him word for word.” Elihu shut his eyes and drew his brows together. “He said, ‘Forgive me for putting this burden on you, but I know of nobody else I can ask. My doctors promise me only another few years of life even if I retire. I want to leave my people a better legacy than chaos, famine and poverty. Can you tell me how?’

“Madam, there’s no need for a representative of the Beninian government. To Zadkiel Obomi the people of Beninia are his friends, practically his family, and he’s been their sole support and breadwinner ever since 1971. He’s not asking for help in the name of a government. He’s asking for a way to provide for his dependants when he dies.”

There was silence. During it, Norman found himself trying to signal telepathically to Old GT: don’t call the vote now, they didn’t understand what Elihu was saying, you’ll risk catching them while they’re unconvinced …

But GT was saying, “Unless there are further questions…? We’ll proceed to the vote. Those in favour of accepting the report from projects and planning—?”

Finger almost numb from the pressure he was applying to his own affirmative button, Norman stared at the pattern of lights on GT’s throne. Green nine-eleven-fifteen …

Made it!

He glanced at Elihu, wanting to share by an expression of jubilation the delight the verdict had provoked, and discovered that the older man was gazing at him with a wholly different look. There was a sort of fierceness in his face, as though to say: I trusted you, you’d better prove me right.

And all the implications of what had just happened came crashing down on Norman’s undefended mind.