Frederik Pohl: Jem

“Thanks, poppa. And thanks for that Pak’s report.”

“Had what you wanted in it?”

“Yep. Will you talk to the minority leader for me?”

“Already have, honey.”

“And?”

“Oh, he’s all right. If you get past Gus Lenz, I think you’ve got the committee taken care of. He didn’t say much at the hearing.”

“I didn’t expect him to.”

Her father waited, but as Marge did not go on he did not pursue the question. He said, “There’s a follow-up on your Pakistani friend. He’s at some kind of a meeting at K’ushui, along with some pretty high-powered people.”

“K’ushui? What the hell is a K’ushui?”

“Well,” said her father, “I kind of wish I could give you a better answer than I know. It’s a place in Sinkiang province. We haven’t had, uh, very full reports yet. But it’s not far from Lop Nor and not too far from the big radio dish, and Heir-of-Mao’s been there five or six times in the past year.”

“It sounds as though they’re going to move.”

“I would say so. I plugged in your estimates, and the best interpretation is that Heir-of-Mao’s starting to do what you want us to do.”

“Shit!”

“Not to worry,” said her father. “I told that to the minority leader in strictest confidence. And I have no doubt he’ll tell Gianpaolo. So it’ll work for you, you know.”

“I wanted to be first!”

“First doesn’t always pick up the marbles, honey. How many people discovered America before the English put it in their pocket? Anyway, tell me what’s so interesting about this planet.”

Margie looked out at the high-rise apartments in the Virginia suburbs, ziggurats climbing away from the south exposure with the black-on-black textured squares of their solar heating panels.

“It was all in Ahmed Dulla’s report, poppa.”

“I didn’t read it.”

“Pity. Well, there’s a little star with a lot of crummy little planets and one big one about the size of Earth.

Gravity’s a little lighter. Air’s a little denser. It’s a lot of real estate, poppa. And it reeks of life.”

“We’ve found life before.”

“Mosses and jellyfish! Crystal things that you can call alive if you want to. This is different. This is a biota as varied as our own, maybe. Maybe even a civilization. The planet’s interesting in another way, too. It doesn’t rotate, I mean relative to its primary — like the moon doesn’t rotate relative to Earth. So the lit side of it has a sun in the sky all the time.”

Her father listened comfortably, scratching his abdomen just below the navel, while his daughter went on about the planet. When she paused for breath, he said, “Wait a minute, honey.” He leaned forward to turn on the radio; even in a routinely debugged car God Menninger didn’t take chances. Over the twang of synthetic guitars he said, “There’s something else you ought to know. The fuel countries are talking among themselves about a sixty percent price rise.”

“Jesus, poppa! I’ll never drink another shot of Scotch!”

“No, it’s not the British this time. It’s the Chinese, funnily enough.”

“But they’re people exporters!”

“They’re anything-they-like exporters,” her father corrected. “The only reason they’re in the People Bloc is that they can swing more weight there. Heir-of-Mao plays his own game. This time he slipped the word to the Greasies that China was going to raise its own prices unilaterally, whatever the bloc votes to do. So that was all the hard-liners in Caracas and Edinburgh needed. The Saudis were for it, of course. They want to stretch out what oil they’ve got left. And the Indonesians and the rest of the little ones just have to go along with the big boys.” He paused thoughtfully. “So your coming along with a chit for half a million tons of oil gets a little complicated right now.”

“I see that, poppa. What are we going to do? I don’t mean about my project, I mean the country.”

“What we are not going to do,” he said grimly, “is raise grain prices. We can’t. Heir-of-Mao’s joker is that the price rise is for export sales only. He considers any sales inside the People Bloc as domestic. So he’s selling cheap to the Peeps, and that means they’re getting what they need for irrigation and fertilizer at bargain-basement prices. If we raise the price we’ll make it worth their while to stop importing in another three or four years. We could stand it in this country, maybe. But the Soviets, the Indochinese, the Bulgarians, the Brazilians, and the rest of the Latins — they couldn’t handle it. Their economies would be wrecked. It would break up the bloc. No doubt that’s what Heir-of-Mao has in mind.”

He parked the car in the Dulles short-term lot. Before snapping off the radio he said, “It won’t happen for a couple of months, I think. So you want to get your project on the way as fast as you can.”

Marge slid out into the damp, hot evening air. The humped backs of boarding clamjets loomed over the parking lot hedge. They could hear the noise of two of them warming up and the gentler rush of another taking off.

Marge followed her father as he picked up her bag and started toward the terminal. “Poppa,” she said, “can I tell the senator about, uh, that?”

“Christ, no! Not that he doesn’t probably know it already. But you aren’t supposed to know.”

Surprisingly, she laughed. “Well, I was going to handle it a different way anyway. Hey, hold it, poppa. I’m not taking the Houston flight.”

“You’re not?”

“Uh-uh. I’m going home by a different route.”

Menninger kissed his daughter good-bye at the check-in counter for the Denver clamjet. He watched her disappear into the gate tunnel with mingled admiration and rue. He had been thinking about asking just how she proposed to handle Senator Lenz, but he didn’t have to. This was the flight Lenz would be on.

Because it was a night flight, the jet sat there for twenty minutes of preheating before it could take off. The passengers had to be aboard, and the stews scurried up and down with ear stoppers and sympathy. The best heat source there is is a jet turbine. The engines that would thrust the plane through the air in actual flight were now rotated inward, the shell-shaped baffles diverting the blast to pour countless thousands of BTUs into the clam-shaped lifting section.

Marge took advantage of the time to scrub her face, brush her hair, and change her makeup. She had seen the senator come aboard. She debated changing from her uniform into something more female and decided against it. Wasn’t necessary. Wasn’t advisable. It might look calculating, and Marge calculated carefully ways to avoid looking calculating.

The full-energy roar of the warm-up jets stopped, and everyone belted in for takeoff. That was a gentler sound. The clamjet bounced a few times and soared steeply up.

As soon as they were at cruising altitude Marge left her cubicle and ordered a drink in the forward first-class lounge. In a couple of minutes Senator Lenz was standing over her, smiling.

Adrian Lenz had two terms and two days seniority in the Senate; a friendly governor had appointed him to fill a forty-eight-hour vacancy just for the sake of the extra rank it would give him over other senators elected the same year. Even so, he was not much over forty. He looked younger than that. He had been divorced twice; the Colorado voters laughed about their swinging senator’s bad luck but reelected him without much fuss. He could have been chairman of his own committee, but had chosen instead to serve on committees that were of more interest — and more visibility. One of these days “Gus” Lenz was going to be the President of the United States, and everyone knew it.