Charles Sheffield - Starfire

Nick said only, “I’m surprised that you can stand to come back here, with all those memories.”

“ Stand to come here?” Gordy Rolfe twisted his head to look sideways up at Nick, even though Lopez had stooped slightly to see in through the classroom window. “Senator, you’re so-o wrong.” He moved into the schoolroom, gesturing to Lopez to follow. “When the Eye of God was recaptured and taken away to be put back into judicial sleep, my mother and father and the other Legion members wailed and moaned and acted like it was the end of the world. Me, I did the same — in public. But in private I danced. Pearl Lazenby scared me shitless. When I heard that she had died after three more months in judicial sleep it was the happiest day of my life.”

“Were you still here then, with the Legion?”

“Yeah. But it was already starting to fall apart. See, the Eye had prophesied that she’d wake up at a time of great disaster and lead the Legion members to take over the whole world. The supernova happened, and they hauled her out of judicial sleep. The prophecy was validated. Everyone said, this is it. They were primed and ready to go. Pearl assured them that the great victory of the Legion of Argos was only days away. Then the boys from Washington came in here and grabbed her, and suddenly the holy cleansing was over before it started.”

“Not just the boys. Did you know that Tanaka led them here?”

Gordy Rolfe stood in front of a bank of three old elevators, ready to enter the middle one. He swung around sharply at Lopez’s question. “President Tanaka? I thought she was off on the Mars expedition when the gamma pulse hit. That’s what her bio said when she ran for President.”

“She was. She got back just in time to help Special Forces capture Pearl Lazenby.”

“Then I owe her one. Hell, if I’d known that, I might have voted for her. Anyway, when Pearl was taken away, nobody in the Legion could believe it. Her prophesy had been wrong, see, and when she prophesied as the Eye of God she was supposed to be infallible. Some of the old-timers tried to weasel round that, but the newer members weren’t buying. People started leaving.”

“Not you, though.” Lopez followed Rolfe into the elevator.

“No.” Gordy Rolfe pressed the bottom button, which bore an icon like a flaming torch, and they began to descend. “Once she was out of the way, why leave? There were opportunities for a genius at headquarters.”

“A genius like you?”

“Who else? I knew I had talent. And I didn’t know a damn thing about the world outside. I stayed behind, looked at what the Legion was ready to walk away from, and started work. That was the beginning of the Argos Group. Houston is the official headquarters, but I prefer this. I come here more and more often.”

The elevator was descending, slowly and noisily. Nick wondered what would happen if it broke and they became stuck a thousand feet underground. He decided that anyone able to design and build robots as complex and capable as the rolfes would certainly have allowed for elevator maintenance. Gordy was just doing what Nick had so often done, choosing a meeting place where he had the psychological advantage. Probably there were other surprises ahead.

But not, perhaps, at once. The elevator creaked to a stop and the door opened on a long chamber painted in gunmetal gray. Every few feet along the walls, Nick saw a lurid and unvarying design: the scarlet talons of a bird enclosing a green globe.

He stopped by one of the painted symbols. “The original symbol of the Eye of God.”

“Yeah. I didn’t change the paintings down here; they’re all over most of the walls. Don’t you think it makes a nice official emblem for the Argos Group?”

Rolfe’s voice burned with a nervous energy that Nick Lopez encountered only in his meetings with Gordy. Even with the aid of telomod therapy, how long could a man operate at that level of intensity? Rolfe was forty-three years old and he looked over sixty.

Nick made his own reply deliberately casual. “It all seems pretty run-down. I assume we’ll have a shielded environment where we can talk?”

“Right here. We can start anytime. I doubt there’s another human within five miles, and we’ll be under a thousand feet of rock and earth. That’s good against most taps — unless one of us is recording.”

Which, as it happens, I’m not. But we would both deny it if we were. Nick ignored the patronizing tone and the implied question and ducked his head to follow Gordy Rolfe up a tight spiral staircase of gray metal designed for someone a foot shorter than Nick Lopez. At the top Rolfe paused to operate a circular hatch, locked from below. Nick wondered about that. Wouldn’t a private hideaway be more logically locked from the other side? He had seen nothing to stop anyone from wandering into the old schoolroom and taking the elevator down.

Nick followed Gordy through the hatch, straightened, and glanced around him. “I don’t remember talk of anything like this when the Legion of Argos was in the media. Is it new?”

“Depends what you mean by ’new.’ ” Gordy Rolfe closed the hatch. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched Nick’s examination of their surroundings. For a change, he seemed genuinely pleased. “None of this was here in Pearl Lazenby’s time. I’ve been developing it for twenty years.”

The spiral staircase and entry hatch led to the center of an enormous room that was at first glance a conventional combination of living space, engineering laboratory, and office. A compact kitchen, complete with generous storage cabinets, sat behind a waist-high partition on the left. On the other side of the partition was a bedroom and a small closed-off area that Nick assumed must be a bathroom. The office was well equipped with desks, chairs, files, communications equipment, and three-dimensional display volumes. Next to it sat the work area, its long lab bench covered with tools and a mass of electronic test equipment. Half a dozen rolfes in various stages of disassembly stood along the wall.

That wall was the most unusual feature of the room. It formed one continuous circular barrier about twenty meters across, rising vertically to a white ceiling far above their heads. A single bulbous door, set in the wall close to ground level, provided an entrance big enough for a man to walk through. The door, like the wall, was transparent. Beyond lay a jungle of dense vegetation, stretching away for an indeterminate distance.

Nick Lopez craned his head back, seeking the source of light. It came from the ceiling, not as a discrete source but as a continuous glow.

“Matches the solar spectrum,” Gordy Rolfe said, “and it follows the surface diurnal rhythm. It’s late afternoon there, so it’s late afternoon here. If we want light later we’ll have to turn on separate units in my office. I don’t often do that, because I want the habitat to mimic natural conditions.”

“You mean out there, where the plants are?” Nick had walked forward to take a closer look at the wall and door. Beyond the barrier the plants grew dense and to shoulder height. The vegetation had an odd blue tinge to it. Nick rubbed the smooth wall, then rapped on it with his fist.

“Not just plants. Animals too.” Gordy Rolfe came to his side. “Go ahead, hit as hard as you like. You won’t make a dent in it. It’s hardened plastic, half an inch thick and stronger than steel. It runs all the way to the ceiling. The door has mechanical as well as electronic locks, and it can only be opened from this side.”

Nick Lopez backed away from the wall. He was not a nervous man, but this didn’t feel like one of Gordy Rolfe’s mind games. He saw the tops of a group of dark green ferny plants swaying, as though animals were moving below or behind them. “You have something dangerous out there?”