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TWENTY-EIGHT Out on Elba

"You can't say thaT!"

Empleado pushed through the small crowd gathered around the general. The KGB agent's expression was frightened, but his face was red with fury. When he spoke, Gutierrez saw little gobbets of saliva burst from his lips.

"You're talking to the goddamned Banker! Don't you realize—"

"You're losing it, Art." Ortiz, who'd replaced Richardson as captain of the Hatch, was the one man in the expedition shorter than its commander. Broad as he was short, scuttlebutt had it that his great-great-grandfather had been a Yaqui chieftain. The general straightened and turned toward him, but didn't interrupt. "What can Deshovich do to us that hasn't been done already—maroon us on an asteroid?"

"He could—" Empleado stopped, jaw hanging. People laughed at him, a sound he couldn't have heard much since beginning his career. He closed his mouth, realizing for the first time, perhaps, that the Banker's threats were empty: Earth's only spacegoing vessels were right here. And apparently it hadn't dawned on him before now that he was cut off from his source of power. Around him, more faces broke into appreciative grins. Even Pulaski was enjoying his discomfiture in her sheepish way. They couldn't get home, was the thought they all shared—all but the KGB man—but on the other hand, home couldn't get them, either.

For Gutierrez, among others, it meant a war was over before it started. The last time he'd been summoned to the radio this way, he'd been ordered by his now-"retired" leaders to use his forty-two-person "force," mostly scientific and technical personnel with little or no combat training, to drive the nautiloids off the asteroid. The fact that this would pit a handful of shotguns, rifles, and side arms, obsolete even on Earth, against pocketable nuclear plasma weapons half a billion years more advanced hadn't counted with the politicians who didn't have to live with the consequences.

One of those consequence was visible about him now, automatic pistols in flapped military holsters slapping the legs of engineers and laboratory types who'd never even handled a gun before. Better acquainted with such lethal hardware, Sebastiano not only carried a nonregulation Glock 9mm instead of the official EAA Witness the American military issued (his privilege as a command-level officer), but leaning against the console beside him was a twelve-gauge semiautomatic Remington shotgun from which he'd become inseparable the past couple of days.

Even Gutierrez, to his astonishment, found himself lugging not one but two handguns, picked up when their owners had no further use for them. At the time he'd been less concerned with self-defense than with keeping dangerous toys out of careless hands.

The stainless, short-barreled Smith & Wesson .44 magnum (even more nonregulation, if possible, than Juan's Glock) had been Kamanov's, smuggled like the cigarettes he knew his son Danny was responsible for. The Kahr K9 was evidence that Richardson had been KGB. They were known to favor the tiny pistol: 630 Route 303, Blauvelt, NY 10913, it said, stamped on the pistol at a time when there had still been separate states—and private gun companies. Both weapons dragged at his pockets. If it weren't for the one-piece garment he wore, they'd have pulled his pants down. Tired of the weight, he was somehow reluctant to give it up. It was the first time in his life, the aging fighter pilot thought, he'd relied on any weapon costing less than a hundred million dollars. Somehow, he felt more secure now.

Behind him, he heard Eichra Oren clear his throat. "Excuse me, General, I'm afraid I lack a referent. Would you mind explaining the significance of the name `Laika'?"

Before Gutierrez could respond, there was another interruption. "Why is this man on the command deck," Empleado demanded, glaring at Eichra Oren, "armed with a dangerous weapon? He isn't a member of this expedition!"

Displacement activity. The behaviorist phrase welled up in the general's memory, heard at a leadership seminar he'd been required to attend years ago and remembered because of his fondness for cats. Empleado complained about an edged weapon when he was surrounded by guns, attacking Eichra Oren the same way a cat washes itself furiously when you catch it up to no good. Only now did Gutierrez consciously notice the sword hanging at Eichra Oren's thigh. It should have been the first thing anyone noticed about him. Somehow it never was.

"You know as well as I do, Art," he didn't try to hide his exasperation, "that Eichra Oren is serving as an observer for the Elders. That `dangerous weapon' is his badge of office and he's never without it." He was tempted to ask what good a nondangerous weapon would be. "Try thinking of it as a naval officer's saber. It's the same kind of thing."

"Yes, General," Empleado was unmollified, "but unlike the unsharpened butterknives affected by our Navy, this is more than a ceremonial accessory!"

The remark, Gutierrez knew, was meant for Ortiz, recently transferred from the Navy to Aerospace. But Art was correct, in a minor, nitpicking sort of way. The Elders had no concept of divided powers. Not only did Eichra Oren serve as a policeman and judge, but as an executioner, killing with his hands and a tiny fusion-powered pistol as well as with the more conspicuous sword.

Summoned as what he termed a "p'Nan moral debt assessor" when it appeared that Semlohcolresh had murdered Kamanov, he'd completed his task quickly and with greater success than even he might have wished, when he'd collected on the unpayable moral debt that murder creates by taking the life of Reille y Sanchez, with whom, Gutierrez knew, Eichra Oren had by then fallen in love. The whole thing was tragically dumb, but it had served to delay a suicidal little war it now looked like they wouldn't have to fight. Whatever else he'd said, the Banker hadn't mentioned those earlier orders.

The Elders' envoy had been briefed on present-day Earth before arrival. Gutierrez had been impressed over the past few days with their sources of information, along with whatever technique the man had applied not only to learn the facts, but English, Spanish, and Russian, as well. It appeared, however, that there were gaps in his understanding of human history and culture.

"At the beginning of space exploration," Gutierrez turned to Eichra Oren, determined to ignore Empleado if he couldn't outargue him, "we'd been putting small things into orbit. America managed to send up rats or mice, recovered for later examination, or maybe that was just the plan. In any case, the Russians, not to be outdone, sent up a big payload with a little sled dog named Laika. All over the world, everybody thought that was quite a feat—until the Russians admitted that they couldn't get her down again and had never intended to. She died slowly, of suffocation."

"I see." Eichra Oren frowned. Controlling his scabbard with one hand, he reached to give his dog a reassuring pat. "And this new leader—"

"Self-appointed leader!" Whoever interrupted immediately withdrew into the crowd. Gutierrez suspected it was Danny.

"Self-appointed leader, then," Eichra Oren agreed. "As far as he knows—"

"Or cares!" Gutierrez didn't even bother to look. Smuggler, seditionist, where in God's name had he and the boy's mother gone—on second thought, given recent experience, maybe they'd brought the kid up right, after all.

Eichra Oren was persistent. "As far as he knows or cares, he's stranded his own people here forever, until your consumables run out and you die just like that little dog, of suffocation, starvation, or the cold of space."

Gutierrez nodded. He knew that Eichra Oren had voluntarily marooned himself on this asteroid, at least for the time being, a necessity to which he'd been resigned from the beginning. Even so advanced a species as the Elders, with an evolutionary head start of five hundred million years and an equivalent technological lead, found travel between alternate universes difficult and dangerous. "Or left to whatever mercy a bunch of alien monsters—meaning the people you work for—offer us. Whether he knows that we won't suffocate or freeze—"

"Thanks to the way," Eichra Oren raised his eyebrows toward the canopy a kilometer overhead which lent a yellowish tint to everything beneath it, "the Elders have terraformed this place?"

"You still don't get the point," Gutierrez told the Antarctican. "I've only just seen it, myself. I'm not sure I knew myself why I held that little rechristening ceremony. Simple defiance, maybe. But look: it was a small thing, one poor little husky bitch. People get used to hearing of all kinds of evil happening to other people and they never seem to learn much from it. But animals—I've never been a great animal lover, Eichra Oren, but what happened with that little dog, the calculated coldbloodedness of it, should have told us all we needed to know about socialism."

"General!" Empleado gasped.

"The `us' is figurative, of course," Gutierrez was unrelenting, "it was long before my time. I always thought there should have been bonfires in the streets the next day, the works of Marx, all kinds of leftist magazines and books, set ablaze by those who wrote and edited and published them—and now had reason to know better. That should have been followed by the collapse of America's most successful homegrown socialists, the Democrats and Republicans. But there weren't, it wasn't, and it was the last clear warning we ever got."

"General!"

"Sorry, Art, there's nobody to tattle to any more." Gutierrez turned to Eichra Oren. "When I was a kid, there was a cartoon that showed up in the underground papers called Out On Elba. It was set on an island only a couple of meters across, and only had a couple of characters."

Eichra Oren smiled. "All there was room for, probably."

"Probably." Gutierrez smiled back, mostly at the childhood memory. "The main character was the `Little Corporal,' pudgy, with a face that reminded you of a snail. You know, escargot? He was supposed to represent power put in its place, but you sort of felt sorry for him. His only companion was a pig with a crown who was supposed to be a reincarnated Louis XIV."

"I get it," Sebastiano put in. "King of the Franks!"

Gutierrez watched the colonel struggle from the embrace of the command chair. "I hadn't thought of that, Juan. Louis the Pig was so fat that his feet wouldn't touch the ground, and he wasn't very good company. Always mumbling `L'Etat c'est moi.' The Little Corporal would watch ships on the horizon and wish he were a seagull so he could escape. He once said `Exile, like the Academy Award, is a great honor. It only seems unbearable because you can't share it with all the little people who made it possible.'"

There was no outright laughter this time, but he got appreciative smiles, those of machinist Corporal Owen and life-support officer Lieutenant Lee Marna among them. Sedition appeared to be contagious. Eichra Oren grinned at Empleado, addressing Gutierrez. "Maybe there are exceptions."

Empleado reddened again. "General, I demand that you disarm this loudmouth immediately and eject him from the ship!"

Gutierrez laughed. "You disarm him, Art, I'd like to see that!"

"General!" Roger Betal, the former thug who now avoided his KGB boss, pushed in excitedly. Beside him was Staff Sergeant C. C. Jones, mission information officer (provided that any of this was ever made public), stringer for American Truth, and former network anchorman, retired when he'd suddenly begun speaking with a slur.

Gutierrez had all but forgotten Jones over the past few days. He'd opposed his being in the expedition in the first place. Twenty years ago, with the USA in the last throes of becoming the ASSR, Gutierrez had commanded the famous "Redhawk Squadron," suppressing guerilla resistance. He and Jones had argued over some bright lights—as useful to enemy snipers as to a TV crew—during nighttime efforts to disarm a bomb placed in one of his interceptors where it sat on a runway apron. Gutierrez had won the argument by knocking out the lights—and Jones' teeth—with a fire extinguisher.

" . . . giant centipede!" Betal was saying. Gutierrez decided he'd better pay attention. "It just walked into camp! It says it wants to talk to you, Eichra Oren!" The assessor was responsible for Betal's disaffection, having won the man's admiration by humiliating him in unarmed combat.

Eichra Oren raised a hand before Empleado could speak. "I was just going anyway. That's my old friend Scutigera outside." To Gutierrez, Sebastiano, and Ortiz: "General, Colonel, Major. Coming, Sam?"

"Gladly." The dog bared its teeth at Empleado. "Some of the company around here stinks!"

 

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