Executive (7 page)

I looked at Faith, and she looked at me. “Believe me,” I told her, “when I find an answer, you'll be the first to know. Meanwhile, work things out as well as you can.”

“I think you're in over your head, Tyrant,” she replied.

“In more than one respect,” I agreed wanly. Certainly the Tyrancy was not getting off to a polished start.

Meanwhile, that dread ship moved closer to Ganymede. It might as well have been a planet-buster headed inexorably for the heart of the Planet of Jupiter!

We tried to arrange for a “coincidental” encounter with the ship: a playboy yacht that lost its bearings and strayed into the Saturn vessel's path. But the ship was the soul of courtesy, putting on the screen an English-speaking officer, who provided meticulous and accurate bearings for the stray. Now there were only five days till arrival.

Roulette called. She was in charge of crime—the elimination thereof. “Crime is costing the planet hundreds of billions of dollars per year,” she informed me. “Much of it relates to drugs and gambling. But to eliminate those we have to eliminate the hard-core criminal element. We can spot most of the bad types, but can you keep them out of circulation?”

More unemployed! “I'll work on it,” I told her without conviction.

“She's onto an ugly truth,” Spirit said. “Ninety percent of the crime is done by ten percent of the criminals. That is, most people may stray once or twice but aren't hard-core, while a few are solidly into it. We have to deal with them.”

“How?” I asked. “I seem to remember a debate with Thorley that bore on this, and he was tearing me up. If we imprison all the hard-corists, we are in effect supporting them at the expense of the state, and that will, as Stonebridge will surely advise me, add to the deficit. But I really don't like capital punishment.”

She half smiled. “Maybe you should put Thorley in charge of crime.”

“Thorley is a good man,” I said seriously. “We differ on principle, but I respect his competence and integrity. If I thought there was the ghost of a chance that he would work for the Tyrancy—”

She shook her head. “Not even the suggestion of the ghost of a chance. Have you seen his recent columns?”

“I've been too busy.”

“You have been most eloquently castigated. He makes you seem a complete ass, and dangerous as well.”

“All true,” I said, smiling.

“Most of the other critics are silent. They are waiting to see what happens to Thorley.”

“ Nothing will happen to Thorley!” I snapped. “I honor freedom of the press; you know that.”

“ All dictators promise freedom and reform,” she reminded me. “Few follow through.”

“Asoka did,” I said.

She shrugged. “As I recall, Asoka had some consolidation to do at the outset.”

“And so do I. What next, on that Saturn doom ship?”

“How about a Naval exercise that happens to cut off its approach to Ganymede?”

We explored that. Emerald had sent a representative, a lower officer who was conversant with the current situation of the Jupiter Navy. That enabled me to get information without going on the beam to her ship and also protected my privacy.

“Sir,” the officer said, “that isn't feasible. Such exercises have to be scheduled well in advance and planned meticulously. The Saturnines know all of our schedules, as we know theirs. Such a deviation would be well-nigh impossible, and even the attempt would alert them to our real problem. They are not fools, sir.”

Which was exactly what I had suspected. Naval fleets are not turned on a dime; I had learned that well during my own Naval command. If we tried to arrange something on the spur of the moment, it would be a virtual advertisement that we had some pressing ulterior motive. We might as well challenge the ship outright.

But that I was not ready to do. Mondy's advice was sound: Do not let Saturn know that the premier of Ganymede had tipped us off. Learn about the ship some other way.

Hopie came to me in her official capacity, distraught. “I went to my teachers,” she said, “and they gave me all sorts of fancy reasons why all the present subjects are necessary. I don't believe them, but I can't convince them. I can't find anyone who agrees with me to advise me.”

I smiled. “All Tyrants should have such a problem! Most men of power are surrounded by yes-men who only echo what the leader wants to hear. That's no good.”

“Daddy, you aren't helping,” she said severely.

Something clicked in my mind. “I can give you an excellent source of advice whose notions will agree with those of no one you know but who can really critique contemporary education. Listen to him and argue with him, and you will surely emerge with some positive ideas.”

She viewed me somewhat distrustfully. “Daddy, you're up to something.”

“Of course I am,” I agreed. “But what I tell you is true.”

“All right, I'll bite. Who?”

“Thorley.”

“Thorley!” she exclaimed, shocked.

“Go to him. Tell him your problem. Ask his advice. If he fails you, I'll suggest another name.”

“He wouldn't help you in anything!” she said.

“But you he just might help. You're not the Tyrant; you're just an underling trying to do a job. That, he might understand.”

She shook her head doubtfully. “All right, Daddy, I'll call your bluff. But you'd better be ready with another name.” She flounced off.

Spirit nodded. “Tyrant, you play an interesting game.”

“You know he won't turn her down.”

“I know. Still—”

“She's fifteen. Old enough to wrestle with reality. And it's the only way we'll ever get Thorley's input for the Tyrancy.”

Spirit shrugged, not debating it. We returned to the problem of the ship.

“QYV has sources,” I said.

“But do we want to risk exposure of that connection?”

“If that ship lands, that and the status of Jupiter may become academic.”

“There is that,” she agreed.

“I have something for Reba, anyway.”

So I put in a call to Q. A diagram flashed momentarily on the screen. “Got it, sir,” Shelia said, and put it on again as a still picture. She had captured it on her recording so that now I could study it at leisure without holding open the connection. QYV (pronounced “kife”) was a very private party.

The diagram was a stylized map of a section of New Wash. One chamber was marked. “I'm not ready to go there yet myself,” I said. “I'll send Ebony with the package.” The package was my private narrative of my twenty years as a politician, leading to the moment I assumed the office of Tyrant; I had taken a few minutes to scribble the last sentences, so that it ended at the very point at which this present manuscript begins. QYV had become the repository for these manuscripts; I knew they were safe there.

I gave the package and the address to Ebony to deliver. She could no longer run errands as she had when she was only our gofer, for now she was head of the Department of Population, and a Secret Service man tagged along with her, but I doubted that anyone would pay much attention. Ebony was very good at being anonymous.

“And tell her this,” I said. “ 'I need a pretext.' She will understand.”

“Got it, sir,” she said, and departed.

I brooded over the blip on the screen, now four days distant. “Maybe a rogue ship, a pirate,” I said.

“Something out of our control, seeking plunder.”

“Can't,” Spirit said. “We cleaned the pirates out of space, remember?”

“For the first time I wish there were a pirate left!”

“Even if there were, it wouldn't have either the nerve or the power to take on a Saturnian ship. That's a cruiser, theoretically converted to merchant duty, but you can bet she can blast anything less than a Jupiter cruiser out of space—and will, if provoked. The Saturnians aren't lily-livered the way we are.”

“I'll gild that lily-liver before I let that ship dock!” I swore. But she was right, as she always was. We could take out that ship, but we would have to do it directly, using the Navy—and that would be an act of war. That was to be done only as a last resort. For one thing, if we challenged the Saturn ship and it did not turn back, we would have to blast it—and that would destroy any proof we might have had of its designs.

It seemed that we were caught between being in the wrong, which would be a very bad beginning for the Tyrancy on the interplanetary scale, and allowing Saturn to achieve a significant, perhaps critical, tactical advantage. Scylla and Charybdis—or in the contemporary parlance, CT and BH. To be caught between contra-terrene matter, whose very touch would render a person into something like a miniature nova, and a black hole, that would suck him in and crush him to the size of the nucleus of an atom. I rather liked the imagery but not the situation.

“SeeTee and BeeAitch,” Spirit murmured, echoing my unspoken thought.

We continued to handle routinely hectic matters, trying to get the new government formed enough to function while reassuring parties of both the planetary and interplanetary scenes that everything was under control. Many functions had continued for a while on inertia, but the existing structure was deteriorating, and we had constantly to shore it up on a patchwork basis.

Ebony returned. “She took your package and sent you this one,” she reported, handing me a small box.

“She said it's a fair exchange but that there need be no messenger for the next.”

“Thank you, Ebony,” I said. I would certainly have to deal with Reba directly—but not until this crisis had been negotiated. “How is your own project going?”

“There are too many people,” she said simply. “I went to the library and did some reading. We'd be better off with half our present number, but more keep coming in from RedSpot, and more keep being born. But the resources are running out.”

“Have you a program to deal with this threat?”

She spread her hands. “Sir, short of a planet-buster war, I don't think anything would work.”

“Keep working on it,” I told her. “Root out some experts—Shelia can find their names for you—and see what they say. You're one of the common folk; I want to know what you think is best, once you know the full story.”

“I'd rather just be your gofer,” she said.

“Think larger,” I advised.

We opened the QYV package. It was a miniature holo projector that projected the image of a sheet of paper on which was scribbled the military designation of a ship. As a former Navy man, I knew the system, but I didn't recognize the type.

We summoned the Navy officer and showed him the designation. He squinted at it, puzzled. “That's not one of ours, sir.”

“It has to be,” I said. “That's a JupeNav designation.”

He frowned. “I realize that, sir, but I also know our listings. There's no ship by that designation.”

I got a glimmer of a notion. “How about a sub?”

“Sir, I wouldn't know about that. All subs are classified.”

“Precisely. Because their location must be secret at all times, so the enemy cannot take them out by blind fire at the specific coordinates. But this could be one such.”

“It could, sir,” he agreed, discomfited. Regular Navy personnel did not feel easy about subs, because a sub was a ship-destroyer. In my term in the Navy I had never dealt with a sub. I had, however, had some rather recent experiences with them and fully respected their devious potential.

“Put out a call, Navy protocol, for that ship to contact the Tyrant,” I said.

“But sir, without knowledge of its location, a sealed beam communication is impossible!”

“An open call,” I clarified.

“But a general call—anybody could read it!” he protested, appalled.

“Saturn reads our sealed transmissions, too, and deciphers them as fast as we do,” I pointed out. “But how much attention do they pay to unclassified, uncoded calls?”

“Very little,” he conceded. “It would hardly be feasible to track every open call. There are thousands of routine transmissions every minute. Still—”

“So an open call may be the most private kind we can make, in practice.”

“Well, sir, if you look at it that way...” He was obviously distressed.

“That is the way I look at it,” I agreed.

He stiffened and saluted. “As you wish, sir.”

I returned his salute, and he turned stiffly and departed.

“Sir,” Shelia said.

“Woman, one of these days I'm going to gag you!” I exclaimed. “You don't even let me have five seconds to relax between crises!”

“You told me to cut you off at ten o'clock, local time,” she reminded me. “It is that time.”

Coral came forward. “Day is over, Tyrant. To bed with you.”

“But that sub—”

“Won't answer you directly. Those vessels don't keep their locations secret by sending any kind of transmission. It will reach you in its own time and fashion. You can relax.”

“But there's still so much to—”

She reached up and caught me by the ear. “Move, Tyrant!”

Spirit smiled and sent Shelia an end-of-shift signal. I knew that the enforced break was for them as much as for me; we could not afford to run ourselves down to the point of irrationality. I went.

But the notion of that sub still held me. A sub could take out a ship readily enough, but that would still be an overt act of war. Reba must have had something more sophisticated in mind. How could—?

Coral did not nag me. She simply led me to the bathroom, undressed me, and shoved me into the sonic shower. I continued to mull over the sub. Could it make the attack seem like an accident? Yet the Saturnians were fully as canny about such things as we.

“Enough,” Coral announced. “You're clean.”

Damn it, there was no way to make a torpedo from a sub seem like an accident! And what of the innocent personnel aboard that Saturn ship? I was sure that they had not been told of its mission; only the technicians would know. I had destroyed whole ships in space during my Navy career but had never enjoyed it, and my taste for carnage was no greater now. What was needed was not destruction but to make that ship turn back.

“Sir, you aren't moving,” Coral said. “Come out and retire; I don't want to have to remind you again.”

Suppose there were some way to preempt that ship's controls, forcing it to deviate from its course? If it drifted out of its assigned spacelane, we could legitimately challenge it. But, of course, there was no way to take over a ship from the outside; we would have to sneak an agent aboard, and I doubted that that could be done. Saturn was no slouch at counter-measures.