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TWENTY-SEVEN Laika

The Banker! The idea sent chills down the spine of General Horatio Gutierrez. It could only be the Banker! "I don't know, Juan." He shrugged, attempting to appear calm. "They just said to have all hands stand by for a message from `the highest authority.' "

Surrounded by an array of switches and lights bewildering to anyone who lacked the training they shared, he watched Sebastiano lower himself into the lefthand seat, a position the colonel normally occupied aboard the McCain. This was the Dole, flagship of the expedition. Sebastiano adjusted the microphone tube of his Snoopy cap, the communications carrier he'd just jammed over his head.

Juan looked like a daredevil astronaut, Gutierrez always thought. His teeth shone white against a dark complexion. Almost as tall sitting down as the general was standing up, he sported a diabolical strip of Castillian beard and a nose that was pure Aztec. The confident movement of his slender fingers across the controls spoke of a competence rare these days in America or anywhere in the world—except, it was rumored, Switzerland, South Africa, NeoIsrael, and maybe the PRC. Who could ever tell about the PRC?

Standing behind him, Gutierrez twisted his neck for the fifth time in as many minutes to peer at the portside audio panel, waiting, he realized sourly, like the little dog to hear his master's voice. Through a window he saw a glint of copper rising in a graceful arc from one of many antenna penetrations in the fuselage to a great pseudotree which supported, and finally became, the atmospheric canopy a kilometer overhead. It would be some time, however, before his chance came to listen or to speak, and even then, given the vast distance involved, no real conversation with Earth would be possible. From Earth's viewpoint, it was an ideal situation: Gutierrez and his people were in a position only to receive orders and acknowledge them.

Three hundred million kilometers, he thought. At the moment, nearly two astronomical units lay between Earth and the asteroid, meaning it was twice as far from humanity's home to 5023 Eris as it was from the Earth to the Sun. At a walking pace of six and a half klicks an hour, he figured, stabbing buttons on his calculator watch as if literally killing time, it was a stroll of 5,308 years, almost the totality of written history—human history; from now on he'd have to add that modifier. Running at top speed, the fastest man alive might have shortened it to 1,416 years (the span since Moslems had begun praying toward Mecca), had he been able to keep the pace and had there been someplace to set his feet in all of that vast black emptiness. An auto cruising at 100 KPH might have made the trip in three and a half centuries, an airliner, ten times fleeter, in only thirty-five years.

Three hundred million kilometers. Lightlike energies crossed the vacuum at 300,000 klicks a second. It would require seventeen minutes for signals to arrive at the asteroid from their point of origin and seventeen more for an answer to be heard on Earth, making it an astonishing thirty-four minutes from "How are you?" to "I'm fine, thanks, and yourself?"

Three hundred million kilometers. In a sense, time and place had chosen one another. This was as close as Earth and Eris ever got. That wouldn't always be so—very little is ever always so—the two bodies whirled about the Solar primary at their own individual velocities, like hands on an analog clock. Given that model, it was now 03:15. Before now, and in time to come, when they were on opposite sides of the giant fusion furnace at the center of the system, the distance would double to four units and it would be a quarter past nine. Had this been the case at present, another target would have been selected for the ASSR's first (and now probably last) interplanetary mission and things might have turned out differently.

For the tenth time, Gutierrez checked the row of toggles on the audio panel, making sure the system would relay signals to speakers throughout the ship, to others set up in the campsite outside, and to the remaining pair of shuttles. His attention was focused forward but he could hear, and feel through the deck, the flight deck filling up with curious and worried comrades.

In a corner by the life-support controls, Arthur Empleado of the American KGB kept to himself. Or maybe others were avoiding him. Dark as Sebastiano, older, not nearly as well-muscled nor as tall, he'd begun to acquire a paunch. In another five years his widow's peak would disappear and he'd be bald. The general thought he looked naked deprived of the goons who'd been his shadows the past year. One of them didn't want any more to do with him. Two were dead. A third nursed a ruined knee inboard one of the other spacecraft, which housed a makeshift infirmary.

Gutierrez looked for Rosalind Nguyen in what was becoming a crowd. The Dole's command deck wasn't roomy. It was like a party in a shoebox. Even "Rubber Chicken" Alvarez, cook, garbage disposer, and self-appointed clown, was here. Gutierrez wondered whether his cooking or his practical jokes had won him the nickname. Where was Rosalind? It struck him that with Estrellita gone, the Vietnamese physician was the best-looking woman on 5023 Eris. The unbidden thought made him feel guilty, not only toward his wife of thirty years (that always happened when he thought of other women), but toward poor, dead Reille y Sanchez. For refuge he resumed his earlier ruminations, reflecting that the interceptor he'd waged war in might have brought him here in a mere eleven years, had it been able to carry enough fuel for the voyage and had there been something for its engines to breathe. As it was, the ancient shuttles they'd inherited, another order of magnitude faster, had managed the task for him and the others in a little under a year.

"General?" Tech Sergeant Toya Pulaski, amateur paleobiologist (and as it turned out, they'd needed one), handed him a cup. An odd girl, nervous and plain, she'd figured out what was happening here before any of the beings who knew had gotten around to explaining it. The coffee was a gift from those who were at once their hosts and the source of half their troubles. The other half originated with the voices they were waiting to hear on the radio.

"Thanks, Toya. Hullo, Eichra Oren, Sam." Gutierrez sipped coffee. He'd become aware that beside him stood the only human here who hadn't arrived in one of the shuttles, one of an unknown number of nonnautiloids the Elders had brought with them from various alternative realities. At his knee, as usual, sat a large, white, shaggy dog, its black-lipped grin resembling a Samoyed's.

Eichra Oren was not a large man. Something about the way he carried himself made up for that. He practiced an almost magical martial art that resembled interpretive dancing and produced truly horrifying results. Born into a culture gone from Earth for fifteen millennia, he chose to wear faded denims and Hawaiian shirts among his ship-suited fellow humans, perhaps to make his civilian status as plain to them as possible. He was aboard the Dole today as an observer for the Elders.

At last a voice issued from the radio, filtered and hissing from a voyage across unimaginable distance, yet still carrying the precise, compelling tones for which its owner was famous: "Official message to officers and crew of the interplanetary expedition of the American Soviet Socialist Republic."

"The Banker!" The hoarse whisper issued from an aft crewstation. It must be Empleado, Gutierrez thought, if only because of his penchant for stating the obvious. Eichra Oren looked a question.

"Nikola Deshovich," Gutierrez told him, "the real power now on Earth."

"Under him," somebody quipped, "the KGB compounds your fractures daily."

Deshovich was going on: "Those who have been your national leaders, now retired in the light of events on Eris 5023, are enjoying a well-deserved rest in contemplative isolation."

Eichra Oren raised an eyebrow. "Meaning they've been jailed or killed?"

Gutierrez nodded. "Because of what Deshovich and his cronies regard as their bungling of the situation here."

The man shook his head, "All that, from just `in the light of.' "

The general put a finger to his lips. "There's more."

" . . . while suitable candidates for their replacement are sought. I, as Chief Executive, have undertaken to fulfill their responsibilities, as much for the sake of the people of the American Soviet Socialist Republic as for the United World Soviet as a whole."

Sebastiano wrenched around in his seat, looking up as if to say, Here comes the real message! Gutierrez gave him the same librarian's signal he'd given Eichra Oren and took another drink of coffee.

"Clearly, my first task is to deal with counterrevolutionary contamination of Marxist thought arising from your leaders' incautious fraternization with certain indigenous reactionary elements, which now threatens to impair our long-held mutual goal of an enlightened, ideologically unified Cosmic Collective."

So the old dream, a System-wide Soviet, was still alive. Gutierrez shook his head. And he was going to be the fall guy. Yet if it weren't for his "incautious fraternization," they'd all have starved or suffocated by now. Much of the expedition's equipment, as well as many of its personnel, had proven less than adequate.

Sebastiano grinned openly at Eichra Oren. "Bad enough your Elders are individualists," he offered, "they're capitalists, too!"

Eichra Oren shrugged as if to say it wasn't his fault, although everyone knew he shared the nautiloids' peculiar philosophy. Seeing it enforced (not quite the same as enforcing it) was his profession.

Unaware of Sebastiano's commentary, Deshovich went on: " . . . unless a way can be devised by which mankind may benefit sufficiently from contact with these so-called `Elders' to justify the attendant risks, I have ordered that the expedition be reported lost and its personnel declared dead."

So, Gutierrez thought, he wants his cake while thinking up a way to eat it, too. The edict provoked a harsh buzz of angry surprise. Sebastiano spoke a few words of gutter Spanish, echoed in English and other languages, including Russian. There was derisive shouting from outside the ship.

"Quiet!" The general's family and friends were part of a public about to be told he was dead. He felt pain and realized he'd set his jaw hard enough to break a tooth. Veins pulsed in his forehead and neck. He frowned at his cup, trying to breathe deeply and listen to the radio at the same time.

" . . . on penalty of death, to send no further transmissions, which will be jammed in any event, nor to return to Earth. Do not acknowledge this transmission. Message ends."

Leaning awkwardly over Sebastiano's chair, Gutierrez bent the colonel's mike toward his own lips. At the same time, he stretched an arm behind him, letting the last few drops of coffee slip over the rim of his cup.

"Message received and understood," he told the Banker, disobeying the man's final order. As coffee splattered to the deck after its long fall in one-tenth gravity, he added, "Before signing off for good, I want you to hear this: I hereby rechristen this spacecraft, Laika!"

 

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