Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

“Fair seasons, Haran,” he said, speaking in English. “It looks as though Phase Two has gone off all right.”

“Phases One and Two were the easy parts,” Haran tye Felthan replied stolidly. “Warden Vekrynn couldn’t care less about what we did to the space colony, and until recently he hasn’t had any reason to concern himself with Ceres—but it’s all different now, Lorrest. He’s bound to have heard about the disappearance by this time, and he’s bound to have connected it with us, and with any kind of computer survey of the possibilities he’s bound to…”

“You’re bounding faster than a kangaroo,” Lorrest cut in. “Has there been much public reaction in France?”

“Practically none. Up to the present six different organisations have claimed responsibility for flattening the Eiffel Tower, and the average citizen here finds that more interesting than astronomers losing a ball of rock.”

“They’ll learn,” Lorrest said cheerfully. “It’s been quiet here too. A few stargazers-are-scratching-their-heads stories in the magazine programmes…nothing more…but they’ll learn. Everybody’s going to learn.”

“Lorrest!” There was a brief pause, and when Haran spoke again he sounded edgy and depressed. “I didn’t get the scheduled check call from Orotonth this afternoon.”

“It could be a foul-up in the telephones.”

“Could be, but if the Bureau has picked him up he’ll have told them everything he knows.”

“Which isn’t very much.”

“Except that he knows you’re in Baltimore,” Haran said. “Think about it, Lorrest. If Vekrynn has any inkling of what is happening he’ll think nothing of spending a million, a billion, to pull you in before it’s too late. You’ve got to be careful.”

Lorrest snorted his indignation. “When was I ever not careful?”

“Do you mean within the last week? How about your going off on your own and trying to recruit that woman in Annapolis? We’re not a religious organisation looking for converts, man. We’re up to our necks in a very dangerous…”

“Point taken,” Lorrest said quickly, unwilling to discuss his tactical blunder of a few days earlier. “But you wouldn’t be talking like that if I’d got the location of the north-east node out of her.”

“And I wouldn’t be talking to you at all if she’d turned you in.”

“Let’s not hold a post-mortem,” Lorrest said, using a favourite formula for dismissing any consideration of his impulsiveness. The reminder that one of his personal foibles could have endangered the most important plan ever conceived by 2H left him feeling guilty and nervous, and when he had finished the telephone conversation he prowled around the apartment several times, scowling at the floor and trying to define his position with regard to the outside universe.

One of his most serious problems, as he saw it, was that he tended to regard everything as a kind of game. Haran was justified in sounding so serious, so dire , but at the same time—and knowing perfectly well that his colleague was right—Lorrest was unable to repress a flickering of contempt and amusement. He could remember how in his second decade he had heard for the first time about the doctrine of Preservationism and the role of the Bureau of Wardens. The idea of studying the rise and decline of civilisation on a hundred human worlds for the sole purpose of ensuring that Mollanian culture could continue indefinitely had struck him as being both egocentric and craven. On learning that the observation was done in secret, and that there was never any intervention—even when a civilisation was spiralling down into final extinction—because “the data would have been invalidated”, he had unhesitatingly declared the policy to be criminal, callous and inhuman.

He had become an activist and had published articles stating that Mollan, as the probable fountainhead of mankind, had a moral obligation to unite, guide and where necessary aid the younger human cultures—but always there had been the faint sense of solving an abstract problem or taking part in a college debate. The requirement was to work out what was right or wrong and to cast a vote, to support one’s chosen team and wave its colours. Even when he had joined 2H and had been told to infiltrate the Bureau of Wardens, even when he had undergone the drastic cranial and facial surgery and had been sent to Earth, even when he had been arrested and had escaped to become a fugitive in an alien society—he had retained a sneaking suspicion that his life had not really begun. To use a Terran colloquialism, he had always been waiting for the main feature to start. Now people were assuring him that the main feature was well under way, and he could not quite believe them…

This is bad , he thought in unexpected panic. There’s a world and all its people at stake and all I do is drift!

The room suddenly seemed small and oppressive, and the sunlit word outside correspondingly more inviting, a better place in which to think. There were three days to wait until the 2H plan reached its irrevocable climax, and at any point up to a few hours before zero all the years of planning and work could be negated by his making a single mistake. It was essential that he should pull himself together and get his thinking straight, and a plunge into the bright winter chill seemed as good a way as any to begin. He took his slate-grey overcoat from a closet, put it on and went out into the corridor.

There was a sign at the elevator saying it was operating that day, but he decided against paying the surcharge and went down the nearby stair. As an after-effect of Haran’s call and his bout of introspection, he was abnormally alert when he reached the bottom flight. At another time the four tall men shouldering their way into the lobby through the glass doors might not have drawn his attention, but on this occasion he picked them out at once and recognition jarred him to a halt.

Mollanians!

The word clamoured inside his head as he backed up the stairs to the first corner. One of the men had gone to the reception desk, one was heading for the hotel’s rear entrance, another was approaching the elevator bank and the fourth was walking directly towards the stairs. Their behaviour was odd by normal standards, Lorrest realised, but understandable if the object was to seal off the building. He turned and sprinted towards the upper floors, easily taking the steps four at a time, his heart thudding with a fierce excitement. At the third floor he swung into the short transverse corridor and ran to its end, where an emergency door opened on to the fire escape. His instinct was to throw the door open and launch himself down the outside stair without checking his speed, but a warning voice sounded above the thunder of blood.

He slid to a halt, very gently opened the door and looked down the fire escape.

A big man was waiting in the alley below.

Lorrest closed the door, his mind grappling with the fact that the man had been standing with one hand thrust inside the unzipped front of his quilted jacket. Weapons? Would Vekrynn’s men use weapons against him?

The answer came immediately, impelling him back towards the hotel’s main stair in an urgent loping run. He carried defences against certain kinds of radiation weapons, but there was no guarantee his pursuers would not employ drug darts. He reached the stairs without encountering anybody and was going up them in great leaps, two to each short flight, when it occurred to him that he was running blind. Any hiding place he might chance on would be discovered sooner or later, and there was no escape route in the upper part of the hotel, unless…unless he dared take what was, for a Mollanian, an unthinkable risk…