Algis Budrys - Michaelmas

“Do you think she wants a second opinion on Allen’s scenario?”

“I doubt it. I think she wants Daugerd to come look at some holograms from a sweetmeat store as soon as she can get him to Cape Girardeau.”

“Yes. Indeed.”

Daugerd was the systems interfacing man for the prime contractor on the type of module Norwood had been using. Every six or eight months, he published something that made Michaelmas sit upright and begin conversing in equations with Domino. “Well, let me see, now,” Michaelmas said. “If she really does have holograms of the sender, then after he’s confirmed it looks Soviet, there’s only one more link to make. She’ll have to determine whether Norwood really did find it aboard the module.”

“Yes,” Domino said bleakly. “But she may be able to do that. Then she’ll brief her legislators, and they’ll go to town on it. UNAC’s dead by morning, and Theron Westrum may as well pack his household goods. The clock’s turned back twenty years.”

“You really see it that way?”

“Don’t you?”

It could play that way, right enough. Michaelmas smiled wistfully to himself. The way the world worked, once the word was out, the effect would take on inexhaustibility. There was always not merely the event itself, but opinion of the event, and rebuttal of the opinion, and the ready charge of self-interest, and the countercharge. There was the analysis of the event, and the placement of the event in the correct historical context. Everyone would want to kick the can, and it would clatter over the cobblestones interminably, far from the toes of those who’d first impelled it.

There was, for instance, the whole question of whether handsome, whip-thin Wheelwright Lundigan’s narrow and unexpected victory in the 1992 Presidential election had truly represented grassroots revulsion against a decade of isolationism, or whether Lundigan-Westrum had simply been a ticket with unexpectedly strong theatre. Then Lundigan’s fine-boned, sharp-eyed, volatile wife had shot him through the femoral artery for good but certainly not unprecedented reasons, two months into his term. So there was also some question of whether Westrum or other sinister forces had bribed, coerced, or hypnotized her into doing it. And whether One-World Westrum was Lundigan’s legitimate political heir, and then, again, what Lundigan’s actual politics had been, or if in fact a majority had wanted him to have them.

None of these dilemmas had ever been truly settled— certainly not by the even slimmer election of 1996, which had gone not so much to Westrum as to his mendacious promises that he’d continue the strong-Congress-weak-President tradition, some said. Others claimed arithmetical errors in the first computer-tallied national election. Few such questions in history were ever truly settled, and here they were, all right, still not rusted away, waiting to bounce round again.

For fresher echoes, if on a lesser scale, there were nearly infinite possibilities in Hanrassy’s authentication of the sender story. Shell’s and Daugerd’s reputations, and then those of their employers, and then those of Big Academe and Big Capital, would be at stake—and highly discussible — if the engineering scenario were questioned.

But meanwhile, Gately would be one of the first to burn to get on the air again, and, as it happened, the first open mike he’d come to would belong to EVM, which already had plenty of supporting footage showing Norwood and UNAC being appropriately evasive. It might be a little difficult to preserve a lighthearted tone while commenting on that development.

And in Moscow it would first be early evening and then night as the impact built. Once again, the managers of what was unaccountably not yet the inevitable system of the future would have to stay up late. The incredibly devious and bieskulturni Western nations always had the advantage of daylight. Impeccable ladies and gentlemen would have to leave off playing with their children after supper, or would have to forego the Bolshoi. They would hurry for the Presidium chamber, there to spell out the obvious motives behind this fantastic fabrication by the rabid forces of resurgent reaction. In dignity and full consciousness of moral superiority, with the cameras and microphones recording every solemn moment of the indictment, they would let fall adjectives.

And true, Theron Westrum could forget about his so-called third term. The chances were excellent Viola Hanrassy would be the Twenty-first-century President. If that was not exactly turning back a political generation in the world, it was close enough. But in this generation the Soviets did not have so many immediate worries along their Asiatic borders to keep their pursuit of redress from being entirely single-minded. Which was a word one also applied readily to Viola. There was a hell of a lot more to her than there was to Theron, if you saw the Presidential job as defending the homestead in the forest rather than building roads to the marketplaces.

All that in the blink of an eye, Michaelmas thought. As if I had never been at all. He shook his head in wonderment. Well, there was no gainsaying it —he’d always known he was a plasterer. It would take more time than any one person was ever given to really overhaul the foundations that put the recurring cracks in the walls.

“Are you sitting there being broody again?” Domino said.

“I think I’ve earned the privilege.”

“Well, cash it in on your own time. What’s our next move?”

Michaelmas grinned. “First, I have to go to the lavatory,” he said with some smugness.

But Domino followed him in. “Papashvilly,” he said.

Michaelmas fumbled the door lock shut. “What is it?”

“That first device was just activated. The next person entering the elevator at Papashvilly’s floor and selecting lobby level will have a rough ride. What has burned itself out is the circuit that dampens speed as the car approaches its stop and then aligns the car door with floor level. The passenger will be jounced severely; broken bones are a good possibility.”

“What can you do?” Michaelmas worked at his clothes.

“Keep Papashvilly locked up. He hasn’t found that out yet. But he will soon. Someone will come to get him.”

“What activated the device?”

“I don’t know. But it happened while he was ostensibly receiving an incoming call. It was from a staffer reminding him that he was expected down in the lobby when Norwood arrives. I answered it for him, but of course no one knows that. The component burned on the word lobby .”

“It monitored his phone calls.”

“I think so. I think I could design such a device; it would be a very tight squeeze.”

Michaelmas pulled up his zipper. “So you weren’t able to trace a signaller because there wasn’t any, strictly speaking.”

“The staffer may be a conspirator,” Domino said dubiously. “I’ve checked his record. It looks clean.”

“So what they’ve done is mined everything around Pavel, set to trigger from expectable routine events, and any one of them could plausibly cripple or kill. Sooner or later, they’ll get him. And never be known, or found. That’s good technology.” He rinsed the soap from his hands.

“Yes.”

Michaelmas shook his head. He dried his hands in the air jet, stopping while they were still a little damp and wiping his face with them. “Well, hold the fort as best you can. I’m thinking hard. So many things to keep track of,” he said. “I’m glad I have you.”

“Would sometimes that I had a vote in the matter. Button your coat.”

When he emerged, Michaelmas said “Look sharp” to Domino, and moved down the aisle toward the office. He passed quickly beyond Clementine’s seat. The same press aide who had let him slip down the corridor at Limberg’s now rose smoothly from the lounge nearest the office door. “Mr Michaelmas,” he smiled. “Signor Frontiere is in a brief meeting with Colonel Norwood. May I help you with something meanwhile?”