The office suite of Dougal MacDougal was appropriate in size and splendor for someone with the exalted title of Solar High Ambassador to the Stellar Group. Lying within a huge and perfect dodecahedron, two hundred meters on a side, the suite sat deep beneath the surface of Ceres. In an architect's conceit, the other four Platonic regular solids were nested within it at a considerable loss in useful living space. A crystal tetrahedron formed the very center. By an ornate desk in that tetrahedron sat Chan Dalton. Awaiting MacDougal's return, he had been drinking steadily and popping fizz slugs. Now he felt wasted and was asking himself why he had done it.
The prospect of danger in the Geyser Swirl was not the problem. Danger was nothing new. Anyone who reached a position of power in the Gallimaufries faced danger every day. Chan had received—and given—his share of sudden and violent attacks. His facial scars spoke more of blood and guts than thrown floral bouquets.
Treachery was not the problem, either. You expected to be stabbed in the back, figuratively and literally, by everyone who wanted to get close to the Duke of Bosny. That was fair enough. Hadn't you done the same thing yourself?
Lies were not the problem. Of course you were lied to, you expected it and you discounted what you were told, no matter the source. Even when people were not trying to lie, their output was usually wrong because some rat-head had given it to them wrong. Over the years you had met a few men and woman you could rely on, but no more than you could count on the fingers of one hand. Trying to reach them over the past few days, you learned—not surprisingly—that they were scattered all over. Quality was like a thin veneer on the unfinished rough-cut of the extended solar system.
Even uncertainty was not the problem. You didn't know where you would land when you passed through the Link Network to the Geyser Swirl, or what you would find there. But what else was new? The only certainties in life were unpleasant ones. Tomorrow was uncertain unless you were sentenced to die tonight. And even that was uncertain. You might be reprieved. You might escape. There might be a war or an earthquake.
Chan helped himself to one more fizz slug.
No. The problem today was not danger, treachery, lies, or uncertainty. Perhaps it was impossibility. The impossibility of things going so wrong, and the questions that raised.
Consider the evidence. Give them half a chance, and humans were likely to do stupid, rash things just for the hell of it, or to save themselves from dying of boredom. No other Stellar Group member was like that. The Tinkers, the Pipe-Rillas, and the Angels—especially the Angels—did not take risks. And they applied their safety-first approach to the Link Network. The system itself would not permit the violation of its three Golden Rules:
1. Close is not good enough. Travellers who missed the long, coded sequence of Link settings by a single digit might arrive as thin pink pancakes, or as long, braided ribbons of mangled flesh. Therefore, the settings must pass a multiply redundant check list, so detailed and foolproof that every black hole in the universe would radiate itself away long before an incorrect sequence would be activated.
2. Know your exit point. Careless travellers who needed to breathe could arrive suitless in hard vacuum. An organism for whom high gravity was instantly fatal might land on the surface of Earth. To prevent those things, the Link checking system was supposed to match traveler life-support needs to destination and refuse to allow inappropriate transfer.
3. Two into one won't go. A Link arrival point had to be empty before a Link would be initiated. That lesson, too, humans had learned the hard way. A small high-temperature cloud of plasma in orbit near Jupiter marked the simultaneous arrival of two ships at a Sargasso Dump Link exit point.
The Stellar Group applied the safety rules scrupulously. They would have examined the Geyser Swirl Link point closely before sending their first exploration team. And before sending a second team? Chan couldn't begin to imagine the checking and the re-checking and the triple-checking that must have been done. Undoubtedly, their ships would also have been set up to return through the Network at the first sign of difficulty.
But even with all this, nothing had come back. Chan could imagine being more wily, cunning, and brave than a Stellar Group team. Hell, he wouldn't be here if that weren't true. What he couldn't imagine was being more careful. And that was a very bad omen.
The outer door of the office was sliding open. At last. Chan glanced at the clock built into the ornate surface of MacDougal's desk. As he suspected, the Ambassador had taken far too long. More problems.
"You couldn't get it?"
"Oh, I got it all right." MacDougal had a sour look on his face as he went to his desk. That was all right. Chan was in a foul mood, too. "The answer is not reassuring. It seems that we were provided with false information."
"Happens all the time. Our ship didn't go to the Geyser Swirl?"
"It went there all right. But I am no longer surprised that it failed to return. You see, this was very much a secret and undercover operation. We had to take many things on trust that would normally be checked through official channels. The `highly competent and experienced private team' that I told you about? It doesn't look so good now. The crew captain, Friday Indigo, is a rich man, but it is all inherited wealth. He describes himself as an `entrepreneur,' but he has never earned a penny in his life. And he is a `space expert' who failed his space navigation examination three times and his engineering tests four times. Most upsetting."
"Not to me. It's more worrying when competent people don't come back." Chan studied the scowling image that MacDougal threw up on the display set into the surface of the desk. "That's Friday Indigo? He looks like he's got a pickle up his ass. What about the other crew members?"
"Two of them. The chief engineer and astrogator is a total mystery. We have been able to discover nothing at all about him. There is no name in the files, and we have no background. Not even a picture! He is described vaguely as a `big, fat man.' Certainly he does not have official certification in either engineering or astrogation. But there is another mystery here. When we checked with Venus Equilateral, the Mood Indigo's last stop before it departed for the Geyser Swirl, their senior engineering staff insisted that the ship carried an engineer who knew what he was doing."
"Self-taught, maybe. I am, pretty much."
"You are not claiming credentials that you do not have." MacDougal drummed his fingers nervously on the top of the desk. "Are you?"
"I'm not claiming anything. But if I thought I could get more out of this deal by lying about my credentials, I'd do it before you could spit. What about the third crew member, what do you know about him?"
"Not him. Her. The third crew member is a female, Liddy Morse. I am hoping you can help us."
Chan studied the image of a young woman with dark hair and curiously lustrous and liquid eyes. "Mm. How old?"
"Twenty-four. That's one of the few things we do know about her."
"She's a beauty. But I never heard of her, and I never saw her before."
"Maybe not. But she's from Earth, we think from the Gallimaufries."
"So are a hundred million others. Odd place to look for a space crew member. What are her qualifications?"
"For space work? None. She is described in the crew duty roster as a `general worker with versatile personal skills.' But I think that is Friday Indigo's idea of a joke. Judging from her picture and the limited information that we do have about her, it looks rather as though Friday Indigo—" MacDougal paused. "Well, it seems as though he bought her a few months ago, when he was down on Earth. For purely sexual purposes. Is that possible?"
"If she's a Commoner, it's more than possible. Happens every day of the week and every week of the year. All he'd have to do is find out who owned her contract. Not me or the Boz, in this case. I would have remembered her."
"In this case? Are you admitting that you—"
"I'm not admitting a damn thing. I'm just telling you the way things run in the basement warrens. It's not all flowers and nectar down there, you know. If you don't like what you're hearing, stick it. Tell the boys in Unimine and Foodlines that I'm too immoral for you to work with, and the whole expedition is off. I'll be more than happy to go back home to the warrens."
"You know that is not an option. They would kill me."
"I doubt it. They know what the Stellar Group wants. They'd more likely come straight to me and put the screws on some other way. All right, what else do you have? You might as well get it over with—I can see you're fidgeting."
"Word from the Stellar Group members. I forwarded to them your requirement that the ship you take to the Geyser Swirl must have a Tinker Composite, a Pipe-Rilla, and an Angel on board."
"That wasn't a requirement. Call it more of a test shot. What did they say?"
"They say that they have absolute confidence in you, and that their presence would be quite unnecessary and even indicate a lack of trust. They will have no representatives on your ship."
"In other words, they're scared shitless. Don't blame 'em. That's one worry out of the way. Don't want them looking over my shoulder. Suppose I have to off somebody?"
"They still insist that there be no violence."
"Course not." Chan fumbled in his pocket and found nothing but empty fizz holders. Had he really taken that many? He shook his head and went on, "Violence. Think we'd tell 'em if there was? Good. No aliens. Makes things a lot simpler. Got a ship picked out yet?"
"The best one in the solar system. The Hero's Return, a former Class Five cruiser. An appropriate name, don't you think, considering the mission?"
"Depends whether or not we come back. It takes more than a nice name to make that happen."
"And you'll be under the command of a highly respected officer, General Dag Korin."
"Whoa there, Mr. Ambassador. What's this `in command of' crap?"
"The general is one of the system's great heroes."
"I'm sure he is. But if I'm going to a dangerous place I'd rather be led by one of the system's great cowards. And I'm not supposed to be led by anyone. I thought I was running this show."
"We need a person of known reputation in charge. With all due respect, that's not you."
"Then the expedition can go without me. You can stuff it. I won't have some general getting in the way when I want to do something a Pipe-Rilla might not approve of."
"I don't think you'll find it's that way with General Korin. His attitude to aliens is . . . different. At the very least, you ought to meet with him."
"All right." Chan swept his arm across the desk top. "Then bring him on. Bring 'em all on."
"Not just now, I think." MacDougal caught the glass as it skidded across and off the desk.
"Why not?"
"I don't think that you are in any condition to—I mean, I do not believe that the General can be available at such short notice. Let me arrange it for, let's say, tomorrow morning."
"Bright and early." Chan caught at the edge of another thought. "One more thing, Ambassador. I have to know when this ship—the Return—will leave. How much time do I have?"
"I will have that information for you. Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow morning. Bright and early."
"If you insist." Dougal MacDougal examined the way that Chan Dalton sat slumped in his chair, eyes half closed. Tomorrow morning, Chan Dalton's brain would feel like a boiled pudding.
A person ought to be careful what he asked for. He might get it.
Dag Korin. General Dag Korin. Chan was irritated by him already, and the man had hardly spoken a word.
It wasn't his age, though the General, hero of Capella's Drift, looked about a hundred and ninety-nine years old. It was his boots. Ceres gravity was so weak that you couldn't clatter or stamp on the floor. Chan had tried it, and reaction bounced him high into the air.
But Dag Korin could do it. He must have magnetic soles. He could march up and down on the hard floor of the Ambassador's main office, and every step produced a brain-piercing crash.
And now he was starting to talk, too. Not just talk, lecture, not in an old man's voice but in brazen and stentorian tones that resonated off the ceiling and the bare walls and right through Chan's fragile skull case.
"I share completely Mr. Dalton's dislike and utter distrust of the aliens." Crash went the boots, as the General made a sharp about-turn. "We do not want them with us in our expedition to the Geyser Swirl. What are they, after all? A Pipe-Rilla is no more than an oversized praying mantis, an ugly creature put together from lengths of leftover drain pipe. An individual member of a Tinker Composite has less brain than a horsefly. It takes ten thousand of them together to match a human in intelligence! As for the Angels, to my eye they have always looked as though they belong in a stewpot with other vegetables." Crash, crash went the boots. "And when it comes to the human virtues, of courage and nerve, what do we find? We find them wanting. The aliens—all the aliens—are the most craven, cowardly, fainthearted—if they even have hearts—pusillanimous, fearful, shivering, timorous beings imaginable. The idea that such objects should be able to limit human access to the universe via the Link Network is so totally outrageous that it takes my breath away."
Chan felt like saying, but I worked with those aliens on Travancore, and I liked them. I like them still. I just don't want them in the way if things get sticky in the Geyser Swirl and we have to protect ourselves.
He didn't have the strength to speak, and General Korin was just hitting his stride.
"However, we must not allow our natural disgust with these meddling beings to interfere with our primary goal. First, we will cooperate with them in our journey to the Geyser Swirl, so as to produce an end to the quarantine. Then we must assure our permanent access to the Link Network. We must learn how it was that they were able, twenty years ago, to place the embargo on us. I am told that will be much easier to do once we are again using the Link Network on a regular basis. And beyond that, we must pursue our long-term plan: to assert our dominance, to establish a pax Solis everywhere within the Perimeter—and then extend that perimeter."
No point in mentioning to the General that there was already peace everywhere within the Perimeter. Well, almost everywhere. Let's say, everywhere that humans were not in control. And Chan had no objection to increasing the human sphere of influence; he was in fact in favor of it, provided there was something in it for him. But did Korin have to be so loud about the matter, so early in the day? Chan took a drink of cold water.
How long would it take the expedition to reach and explore the Geyser Swirl? That started another thought. It wasn't just Dag Korin, it was also the other crew members of the Hero's Return. Who would they be, and what would they be like? Chan expected a battle regarding the composition of the crew. There would be room for far more people than the three apparent incompetents running the Mood Indigo. The General would surely propose some absurd collection of his military minions.
One of Korin's own candidates was in the room. She sat at the back, as far from the General as possible. She must have heard him speak before. She had been introduced by Dougal MacDougal at the beginning of the meeting, but Chan could not recall her full name. Dr. Elke Somebody. Some kind of scientist proposed by the General. She had shaken hands with Chan and stared down at him—she was very tall and blond and anorexic-looking—as though he was some kind of slime-mold at the bottom of a pond. Her last name had an `s' at the beginning, which she had spoken with a slight lisp. Th-iry, that's what it sounded like.
That was it: Elke Siry; a proposed crew member in need of a good square meal, but otherwise an unknown so far as Chan was concerned. Just as Dag Korin was a partial unknown. That was bad. One thing you learned, the hard way, was that before you went into a dangerous situation you needed to know your companions inside and out.
Not only that, if you had any sort of choice you didn't let other people decide your team-mates. You picked them yourself. Your ass was going to be on the line, not Dougal MacDougal's or any other Ceres bureaucrat's.
Chan had recognized that from the start. He had sent the word out. But where were they? He had not heard back from a single one. So much for so-called old friends. They were as bad at keeping in touch as he was. On the other hand, could he be sure his messages had reached them?
Crash, crash. Loud, foghorn voice, rivets driving into his skull. " . . . If, indeed, the story of a new Link point in the Geyser Swirl, previously unknown to the Stellar Group and not created by them, is true. Suppose that we are being lured to the Geyser Swirl. Suppose that the aliens.."
Chan was as suspicious of motives as the next man, but he couldn't compete with this. Who could Dag Korin possibly be shouting at? Not Chan Dalton, who sat just a few feet away. Somebody on the far side of the Moon, judging from the volume of sound. Crash crash, turn, quick march back across the polished floor.
Chan couldn't stand any more. He lurched to his feet, almost overbalancing in the negligible gravity of Ceres. "Excuse me."
General Korin halted in mid-stride and mid-sentence. He stared at Chan with impatient eyes. "Do you have a question?"
"Yes. What makes you think that anything the aliens have told us about this is true?"
Korin stared. It must be a novelty, finding someone more paranoid than he was. "Are you suggesting—"
"Yes, I am. I think that every single thing we've been told by the aliens about events in the Geyser Swirl is a lie. When we go there, we must be prepared to deal with any form of chicanery and deception. I have not met the crew you are proposing for the Return, but do they include specialists in trickery and bluffing, or in the fine art of the double-cross?"
Chan could read the look on the general's face. Surprise and suspicion, giving way to conviction and accusation as Korin turned to Dougal MacDougal.
"Dalton is quite right. We must be prepared for every form of misinformation from the aliens. As for our crew, Dalton, you are looking at it. I believe that this expedition will be best served by a minimal and flexible force. You. Me. And Dr. Siry. The ship runs itself. Are you suggesting that we need more military?"
"Of course not. So far as I know, solar military doesn't have specialists in deception and bluffing. I don't know where you would find people like that. But I know where I will." At least, I know where I'll be looking for them. "Give me one week—no, make that ten days—and permit me unlimited travel around the solar system. I will find the men and women we need."
"Civilian government workers?" Dag Korin's tone implied that he would rather work with a complement of toads.
"Not quite that."
"But they have experience operating in a highly structured and defined environment?"
"Oh, sure." Presumably time in prison counted. "Look, don't worry about these people. You carry on planning, but expect up to six more people on board the Return. I must go now."
Before I pass out. Chan didn't wait to hear the Ambassador and the General squabbling over personnel. He had ten days. Ten days to locate the members of the old team and contact them, wherever they were; ten days to persuade them—if he could—that there was still something in it for them after all these years, if only they would travel with Chan to the Geyser Swirl.
No need to discuss Dag Korin with them. They would have plenty of time to learn the General's little ways on the way to the Geyser Swirl.