Frederik Pohl - Jem

Margie sat thoughtfully blow-drying her hair for the next ten minutes, while her mind raced. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the orderly room. “Colonel Menninger here,” she said. “Notify the training officer that I will not be present for tomorrow’s formations, and have transportation ready for me at oh eight hundred. I need to go to New York.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the OD. He was not surprised. All members of the project were restricted to the base, and the orders said there were no exceptions. But he knew who had written the orders.

Margie sat impatiently in the audience section of the Security Council chamber, waiting to be called. The delegation from Peru was explaining its recent vote at considerable length while the other nine members of the council waited in varying degrees of fury to explain each other’s. The question seemed to have something to do with the territorial limits for fishing fleets. Normally Margie would have paid close attention, but her mind was a good many light-years away, on Klong. When the young black woman came to fetch her for her appointment she forgot about Peru before she had left the auditorium.

The woman conducted her to an inconspicuous room marked Authorized Personnel Only and held the door open for her without going, or looking, inside.

“Hello, poppa,” said Margie as soon as the door was closed, turning her cheek to be kissed.

Her father did not kiss her. “You look like hell,” he said, his voice flat and without affection. “What the fuck have you been teaching these ‘colonists’ of yours?”

Margie was caught off guard; it was not any of the questions she had expected from him, and certainly not what she had come to discuss. But she responded at once. “I’ve been teaching them survival tactics. Exactly what I said I was going to teach them.”

“Take a look at these,” he said, spreading a sheaf of holoflat pictures before her. “Art exhibits from Heir-of-Mao’s private collection. Cost me quite a lot to get them.”

Margie held one up, wiggling it slightly to get the effect of three-dimensional motion. “Makes me look fat,” she said critically.

“These came out of the pouch of a courier in Ottawa. You recognize them, I guess. There’s one of your boys throwing a grenade. And a nice shot of a flamethrower drill. And another one of a girl, I won’t say who, stabbing what looks a hell of a lot like a Krinpit with what looks a hell of a lot like a sword.”

“Oh, hell, poppa, that’s no sword. It’s just a flat, sharp knife. I got the idea from watching the stew chef opening up oysters at the Grand Central Clam Bar. And that Krinpit’s only a dummy.”

“Hell’s shitfire, Margie! That’s combat technique!”

“It’s survival, dear,” she corrected. “What do you think? The biggest and ugliest dangers our boys and girls are going to face are the Krinpit and the burrowers and the balloonists and, oh, yes, not to forget the Greasies and the Peeps. I’m not advocating killing, poppa, I’m just teaching them how to handle themselves if killing is going on.” Her face clouded. “All the same, I wish I knew who took those pictures.”

“You will,” he said grimly. “But it doesn’t matter; those are just copies. The Peeps have the originals, and Tam Gulsmit’s probably got a set of his own by now, and the Peeps and the Greasies on Klong are going to hear about it by next week at the latest, and interexpedition friendship is over. Did you listen to the debate in the council?”

“What? Oh, sure — a little.”

“You should have listened a lot. Peru has just extended its ocean borders to a thousand kilometers.”

Margie squinted, perplexed. “What does that have to do with maybe some fighting on Klong?”

“Peru wouldn’t do that without a lot of backing from somebody. They’re nominally Food, sure, because of the anchovy catch. But they don’t have a pot to piss in when the fish go deep, so they try to keep friendly with the other blocs.”

“Which one?”

Her father pushed the corners of his eyes up. He did not do it because there was any risk of this supersensitive room being bugged; it was only a reflex not to speak the name of Heir-of-Mao unnecessarily.

Margie was silent for a moment while the card sorter in her brain ordered her hierarchy of priorities. She came back to Number One. “Poppa,” she said, “Peru can stick their anchovies in their ear, and I’m not going to lose sleep about which one of my people is a spy, and if we get a little scandal about combat training we’ll survive it. None of it’s going to matter in two or three weeks, because we’ll be there, and that’s what I came to see you about. Adrian Lenz is crawfishing. I need help, poppa. Don’t let him cancel us out.”

Her father leaned back in his chair. Margie was not used to seeing Godfrey Menninger looking old and tired, but that was how he looked now.

“Sweetie,” he said heavily, “do you have any idea how much trouble we’re in?”

“Of course, I do, poppa, but—”

“No, listen. I don’t think you do. There’s a tanker aground on Catalina Island today, with six hundred thousand tons of oil that isn’t going to get to Long Beach. Wouldn’t matter, normally. Southern California keeps plenty of reserves. But their reserves got diverted to your project, so they’re low now. Unless they get that tanker afloat in forty-eight hours, Los Angeles is going to spend the weekend in a brownout. What do you think is going to be the public reaction to that?”

“Well, sure, a certain amount of shit is going to—”

He raised his hand. “And you saw the story in this morning’s papers. The Peeps know their tactran satellite was deliberately destroyed.”

“No, it wasn’t! That was an accident. The bomb was just supposed to knock out the supply ship!”

“An accident in the commission of a crime becomes part of the crime, Margie.”

“But they can’t prove — I mean, there’s no way in the world that they can pin it on me unless—”

She looked at her father. He shook his head. “The Italian isn’t going to tell them anything. He’s already been taken out.”

So poor Guido was not going to live to spend his hundred thousand petrodollars. “He gave good value,” she said. “Look what you got out of his microfiches. You have proof that the Greasies set up their base where they did because they had seismic scans to show oil under it. That’s against treaty right there.”

“Don’t be a child, Margie. What does ‘proof’ have to do with it? Sir Tam and the Slopies can’t prove you handed Ghelizzi the bomb, but they don’t have to prove, they only have to know. And they do. Peru proves it. Not to mention a few other little news items you may not have heard about yet, like the American embassy in Buenos Aires being fire-bombed this morning. That’s a little message from Sir Tam or Heir-of-Mao, I would judge. What do you suppose the next message is going to be?”

Margie realized she had been scratching her blisters and made herself take her hand away. “Oh, shit,” she said glumly, and thought hard while her father waited.

But really, she reflected, the basic rules were unchanged. The equation of power was utterly clear. No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. Worse than that. Even the tiniest nation had a minute sliver of muscle of its own, gift of the breeder reactors and the waste reclaimers. Not enough to matter in a global sense, no. But Peru could enforce its decisions if driven to. Ecuador could kill Washington or Miami, Denmark could destroy Glasgow, Indonesia could obliterate Melbourne. Fire-bombings and riots — well, what did they matter? There was a permanent simmer of border incidents and small-scale violence. Each year, a few thousand injured, a few scores or hundreds dead. But the lid never blew off, because everybody knew what would happen.